Rev. Tim W. Jensen, Summer Minister

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

August 11, 1996

For those of us who, for one reason or another, have felt compelled or inspired to attempt the memorization of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the irony of this particular line is almost overwhelming. Few but professional historians or devoted Civil War "buffs" retain much memory of events six score and eleven years ago, when for three long days at the height of summer two American armies -- seventy-five thousand Confederate soldiers and ninety thousand Federals -- fought to determine the destiny of a nation, in and around a sleepy little Pennsylvania town of twenty-five hundred citizens, best known, before that moment, for the manufacture of shoes.

But the 272 words of President Lincoln's "Dedicatory Remarks" are as familiar to our ears as scripture -- indeed, in the case of Unitarians, probably more familiar. "Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." "Testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." "The last full measure of devotion." "A new birth of freedom." And most especially: "A government of the people, by the people, and for the people" -- these phrases are indelibly engraved in our national consciousness, a key component of our national identity. The world has long remembered what Lincoln said at Gettysburg; indeed, without his speech the battle itself might have all but been forgotten now, over a century after so many Americans struggled and died there. On July the Fourth, 1863, as Robert E. Lee's shattered Army of Northern Virginia retreated from the site of its defeat, it was apparent that a great battle had been fought and lost, but the significance of the victory was still not clear. It fell to Lincoln to define with words the larger meaning of the battle that had been fought at Gettysburg, the enduring principles for which so much blood and so much treasure had been brutally sacrificed.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Exactly four score and seven years (to the day) prior to the Confederate retreat from the battlefield at Gettysburg, the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania voted to approve a revolutionary document drafted by a delegate from Virginia named Thomas Jefferson. As many had noted even in his own era, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence announced an ideal of equality far beyond anything that actually existed in America at the time, even though today's sensitive ears question whether Jefferson went far enough, and why only "men" were "created equal" and endowed with the right to the pursue their happiness. In 1848 the Abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, about whom we will hear more in just a few minutes, cynically observed: "To make our theory accord with our practice, we ought to recommit the Declaration to the hands which drafted that great state paper and declare that 'All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights if born of white mothers, but if not, not.'" In composing the Declaration the way that he did, Jefferson had intentionally written a blank check of freedom to future generations. It was to this "unfinished work" that Lincoln wished to draw the attention of the nation, and to which his words continue to draw our attention to this day.

There is a great deal of mythology that has grown up around the Gettysburg Address, just as one might expect regarding something which has proven so important to our national character. It is said, for example, that Lincoln wrote his speech on the back of an envelope while traveling on the train from Washington, DC. The brevity of his remarks is often contrasted with the two-hour oration delivered by Edward Everett on the same occasion, often with the not-so-subtle insinuation that Lincoln said more in two-and-a-half minutes than Everett could say in half the afternoon. These "myths" obscure the very deliberate way in which Lincoln took advantage of the opportunity provided by Gettysburg to raise the stakes in the war between the States. It was no longer a struggle for the abolition of slavery, nor even for the preservation of the Union in preference to "states' rights." Rather, the important issue for Lincoln becomes the meaning of that Union, and the values which it embodies that make the continuation of slavery inconceivable. Liberty and Slavery are intellectually irreconcilable. Lincoln's plea for "a new birth of freedom," rooted in Jefferson's self-evident truth that "all men are created equal," washes away three generations of political compromise, in which human beings were treated as the equivalent of chattel property and counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation. In its place he substitutes an ideal, not of compromise, but of democracy: a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" in which Jefferson's promise of political equality becomes a viable basis of political community.

What is most interesting to me, however, is that apparently many of Lincoln's opinions on these subjects reflect the ideas of the Unitarian minister I mentioned a few moments ago, Theodore Parker, the "Yankee Crusader," whose printed sermons provided a steady spiritual diet of Abolitionist Transcendentalism for Lincoln's Springfield law partner William Herndon, and who is now generally recognized as the original author of the phrase "of the people, by the people, and for the people," which Lincoln made famous by repeating at Gettysburg. Parker was born in the village of Lexington, Massachusetts on August 24th, 1810, the eleventh child of John and Hannah Parker, who had long before run out of the Biblical names they preferred for their children, and thus named their new baby Theodore -- "gift of God." The Parker family were long-time inhabitants of Lexington; Theodore's grandfather, Captain John Parker, had commanded the Minutemen on Lexington Common in 1774, where the first shots were fired of the American Revolution, and is remembered by history as the man who uttered those immortal words you may recall from High School: "If they mean to have a war, let it begin here." There was more than a little of the grandfather to be found in the fiery grandson, who throughout his adult life kept the old "Firelock" musket from which Captain Parker had fired "the shot heard 'round the world" hanging in his study; and on more than one occasion during the fugitive slave law controversy of the 1850's, Reverend Parker threatened to use it again himself in defense of those same principles of human liberty his grandfather had defended in the days of the American Revolution.

Parker was an uncompromising abolitionist, outraged at the moral hypocrisy of slavery in a so-called "free" society. In addition to his regular preaching, he lectured as many as a hundred times a year, often on the topic of abolition; and his sermons and lectures were regularly printed for distribution to an even wider audience. Yet Parker did far more than merely talk about Abolition. He believed that even for a Christian (and he considered himself such), violence was at times an appropriate means for opposing a great evil. Thus Parker was active in the Underground Railroad; and, in 1854, when runaway slave Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston under the new Fugitive Slave Act (which Parker habitually referred to as the "Government Kidnapping Act"), he helped to organize a riot in a failed attempt to break Burns out of jail. Parker was eventually indicted in connection with that riot, although later the charges were dismissed on a technicality, out of fear, some say, of the publicity Parker would have received from such a trial. Not long afterwards, he was active again, this time raising money for the "free soil" forces in "Bleeding Kansas." Indeed, Parker has the dubious historical distinction of having been one of the six outsiders privy in advance to John Brown's plan for the raid on Harpers Ferry. For Theodore Parker, religion's "higher moral laws" were not vague abstractions for another world. They were ethical imperatives for the here and now.

Parker died while traveling in Florence, Italy in 1860, just in time to avoid witnessing the conflagration over States rights, slavery, and succession from the Union brought about by Lincoln's Inauguration and the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861. Yet his legacy endures as an intrinsic part of what is perhaps America's most imporant and well-known peice of political oratory. Parker's radical religious individualism, which in his mind was inseperable from the moral imperative to engage evil in the world wherever you may find it, whatever the sacrifice, is now a permanent part of America's political landscape.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Tim W. Jensen. All rights reserved.