"It is for us the living"

I have been lucky enough to travel to Gettysburg twice.  The first time was with my family, when I was about nine years old.  The second time was in Eighth Grade, as part of a school trip to Washington, D.C. (still among my favorite trips ever, thanks Mr. Smith!).  As an historian, I've talked about the Civil War that made Gettysburg world famous nearly every semester of my professional career.  Indeed, I teach an entire class on the Civil War and just today got to the war in my US History survey class.

But today is special.  Today marks the 150th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.  It is a speech that generations of Americans have memorized (and rightfully so).  It is a speech with a rich history (you can see the various versions, and why there are various versions here).  It is a speech that has been considered both "scripture" and "Gospel" in its use of religious imagery, language and cadence to construct a civil religion (see here).  It is a speech that eclipsed the main speech of the day, which was delivered by Edward Everett.  It is a speech that was panned by many when it was first given (an opinion that has now been overturned).  And it is one that continues to be a touchstone for many, still capable of inspiring Americans and generating news.

None of that is really what I'm interested in today though.  My friend, Thomas Kidd, posted this article today about the Address, in which he focuses on the phrase "new birth of freedom"and how Lincoln's use of familiar religious language not just helped create the aforementioned civil religion, but also perhaps divorced that language from it religious origins.  As Kidd notes, "But what is lost when the new birth becomes tied to a nation’s history, rather than a redeemer’s saving work?"  I think that is a very important question to ask, and one that perhaps academics (including theologians) should ponder.

But Kidds' question is also not one I'm going to attempt to answer, at least not today.  Rather, I'm going to focus on a phrase in the speech that I've been pondering of late, the one that starts the final section of the speech "It is for us the living."  I think it is often easy to overlook that phrase, but it shouldn't be, and not just because of where Lincoln was when he gave the Address.  Of course, he builds to it rhetorically in the speech, which was given in the midst of a battlefield that was rapidly being turned into a cemetery:  Death would have been omnipresent in those surroundings for his listeners.  But I think there is more to it than that.  Ever since visiting the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum a few years ago, I've thought that many scholars, commentators, and folks interested in Lincoln have missed out on how much death was a part of Lincoln's life, and how it shaped him.

Think about it, long before the war related deaths during his presidency, long before there were "great battlefield[s]" to visit, Lincoln's life was never far from death.  His mother's death scarred his childhood. 

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His sister's death was difficult for him as well.  Ann Rutledge (often thought to have been Lincoln's great love before he married Mary Todd) died from typhoid fever (perhaps prompting Lincoln to pen a poem on death and suicide is often attributed to him).  He, along with Mary, buried two of their children (one before his presidency and another during).

Of course, none of these deaths was all that uncommon in nineteenth century America.  Indeed, death was much more "common" in very real ways for people of Lincoln's time than it is for us today.  And yet, each of these death's is also quite "uncommon" or special, because Lincoln to us is so exceptional.  How he reacted to these deaths shaped him as a man, and as a president.  To neglect how much death stalked Lincoln, culminating not just in the wartime deaths of soldiers, but in his own death at the hand's of John Wilkes Booth, we neglect how significant it really was to making him the president we now encounter in all those books.

Which is why that phrase,  "It is for us the living" so sticks out to me.  For all the death he had faced, for all the death that surrounded him, Lincoln never lost sight of the fact that whatever the dead have been able to accomplish before (or because) they died, ultimately it is up to those they left behind to actually finish the work they started, to see it through (or to borrow from St. Paul in Second Timothy 4:7, to "finish the race").  Whatever else the Address may have been at the time or has become; whether or not we now (to flip its words on its head) remember it more than the "honored dead" who fought at Gettysburg, it is good for us to remember Lincoln's charge--the work that needs to be done, is up to the living to actually achieve.