When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
– a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labour may be lightly burdened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.
This passage is the last word on democratic liberties. Try editing it. Try cutting. It is all but impossible to take out a single phrase without doing grievous harm to the whole. Jefferson provides the most comprehensive spoken list since Pericles of the attributes of democracy. This is democracy’s evergreen. It is a checklist of institutions and a standard against which to measure how close a nation approximates to the ideal of popular power. The most resonant phrase in the speech – ‘equal and exact justice for all men’ – is almost a direct quotation from the Funeral Oration of Pericles. The quotation is almost lost in the litany of virtues, but this is a supreme definition of minority rights which shines in the text today as much as it did then. Of course, it wasn’t exactly true. Not every person in America was a bearer of rights. But that does not mean this passage should be thought of as hypocritical. It’s not; it’s a statement of an ideal, a foundation myth and a utopian aspiration. As he did in the Declaration of Independence, when he simply asserted that all men were created equal and were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Jefferson is setting a standard. America didn’t meet it then; no nation does now. But the claim that liberal democracy represents the terminus of political philosophy rests on the list of popular freedoms contained in this passage. The political battle to instantiate them in existing societies goes on but, philosophically, this is the last word.
I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favour which bring him into it … I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts … Relying, then, on the patronage of your good will, I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make. And may that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favourable issue for your peace and prosperity.
There is a crucial wisdom about politics as a career here which is also captured in Enoch Powell’s less accurate axiom that all political careers end in failure. Some careers do pass through success but no success is ever final; politics must go on. The point Jefferson is making here is that the political capital of a leader is at its highest at the beginning of his tenure, when experience is least, and statecraft at its least developed. The statesman’s learning and his popularity run counter to each other. As wisdom gathers, popularity declines. See Tony Blair’s A Journey for a dramatic recent example of the process. Barack Obama is an example of a swell of general hope giving way to specific disappointment. Donald Trump will be subject to the same law of political inflation and deflation.
Jefferson makes a plea that sounds today all too contemporary. He asks forgiveness for his mistakes, and appeals to those who may not be able to see the whole picture to forbear from judgement. Perhaps the most corrosive aspect of modern political culture is the rush to judge on the assumption that every error must be self-serving. Elegantly, Jefferson asks here for a lost art of democratic politics: patience and understanding. It is a lesson we would do well to heed, though we have forgotten how to do so.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Government of the People, by the People, for the People
The Gettysburg Address
19 November 1863
Abraham Lincoln said simply in a sentence something it can take whole books to complicate. If there were a manifesto for democratic politics, Lincoln’s most famous line might be too long to be the title, but it would certainly offer the subtitle. Given that he could cram so much into ten words, it is a wonder he needed all of 272 for the whole speech.
Abraham Lincoln was not, however, the man who really delivered the Gettysburg Address. That honour goes to the forgotten orator Edward Everett, who was top of the bill on the Pennsylvania battlefield in November 1863, to speak the funeral eulogy after the poets Longfellow, Whittier and Bryant turned the invitation down. Lincoln’s task was to come on afterwards and do what were, by comparison with Everett’s lavish address, parish notices. It is the greatest example of stealing the show in all the arts.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) served as the sixteenth president of the United States of America from March 1861 until his assassination by a resentful Confederate-supporting actor, John Wilkes Booth, in Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865. He is one of the icons of American democracy, famously immortalised at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. His is the name most often summoned in the speeches of the presidents who followed him. He is the re-founding father of the American constitution.
Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, the son of a frontiersman. It was, according to Lincoln himself, ‘a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods’. It was not a literate childhood, and in later life he thought himself lucky to be able to ‘read, write and cipher’. Political opponents would later patronise him by wondering how a man of such unpromising literary beginnings could command the language as he did. The answer is bound to be a mystery, especially as he was a self-effacing man. In the words of the writer and diplomat John Bigelow: ‘He [Lincoln] was so modest by nature that he was perfectly content to walk behind any man who wished to walk before him.’
Lincoln’s political career began when he joined the Illinois state legislature in 1834 and, self-taught in the law, was admitted to the Bar in 1837. ‘His ambition’, said his law partner, ‘was a little engine that knew no rest.’ This led Lincoln to a term in the House of Representatives between 1847 and 1849. His political zeal was awakened by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.
A reputation as an eloquent opponent of slavery helped Lincoln secure the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1860. It is also the source of his indelible reputation as one of the great presidents of the American republic. Lincoln’s moral stature on slavery infused his leadership throughout the Civil War and helped to preserve the Union during a spell of potentially terminal peril. As if all that were not enough, there is something else to reinforce the abiding myth of Abraham Lincoln in American life. He is the frontiersman who made it to the White House. He is the incarnate American dream. The man who showed that virtue derives from public service rather than noble birth.
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
The first thing you notice about the Gettysburg Address is its length; just 272 words compressed into ten sentences. It challenges every other writer to cut. The famous final words encapsulate the whole in just