Words and history.

Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words, by Douglas L. Wilson (Knopf, 352 pp., $26.95)

The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows, by Gabor Boritt (Simon & Schuster, 432 pp., $28)

WILLIAM SEWARD, the secretary of state, was not alone among Lincoln's cabinet members in thinking he should have been president instead of that crude individual from Illinois. But by March 4, 1861, Seward felt comfortable enough in his relations with Lincoln to suggest some language for the Inaugural Address. Seward proposed: "The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."

Not at all bad. Lincoln made it immortal: "The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Lincoln's "mystic chords" do not "proceed" but are "stretching," which is more kinetic as well as colloquial, and they are stretching not from "so many battlefields" but from "memory," adding psychological plausibility and also the alliteration of "mystic" and "memory." Lincoln changes Seward's plural to singular in "living heart and hearthstone," as if speaking to a particular home, and again employs alliteration. He appeals to the visual and distinctively American imagination with the sweep of "all over this broad land." Lincoln's masterstroke, however, is to change the faux-supernatural cliche "guardian angel of our nation" to "the better angels of our nature," which shifts from divine agency to "our nature" at its best. Latent in this entire passage we find a comprehensive metaphor identifying the "Union" with a (political) Heaven in which those better angels of our nature touch and play upon those "mystic chords." On that March 4, however, even as he evoked the Heaven of Union, seven states had already seceded, others were on the edge, and so Lincoln also vowed to do his sworn duty as protector of the Constitution, emphasizing that he would protect federal property throughout the South. His prose poem has the smell of gunpowder and a core of steel.

Douglas Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, begins his study of Lincoln's oratorical genius with the remarks the president-elect made from the train platform at Springfield, Ill., on February 11, 1861, as he left for Washington, D.C., "with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington." Did Lincoln even then know, given the magnitude of the looming secession crisis, that he would have to re-found the nation? That he might have to give it the "new birth of freedom" he would proclaim as the meaning of the war in his Gettysburg Address?

He had been through the debates with Stephen Douglas, wielding the "all men are created equal" of the Declaration as his "sword," as Douglas Wilson calls it. Under the pressure of history, Lincoln gave those words of 1776 a new and profounder meaning beyond their "original intent." Gabor Boritt, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, understands--it is one of the many excellences of his new book, The Gettysburg Gospel--that "a living faith evolves, combining the 'ancient faith' with present needs." At Gettysburg, Boritt maintains, Lincoln "gave new life and new meaning to Jefferson's Declaration." The pressure of history shapes language, and the living language continues to shape history.

Neither Wilson nor Boritt explores in depth the particular sources of Lincoln's eloquence. For those, it is of the first importance to consider the constellation of Emerson, Whitman, and Lincoln. In his essay "The Poet" (1844), Emerson called for a new and distinctively American poet: "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem--a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own.... The poets are ... liberating gods."

Emerson was calling for something entirely new, an American poet, not a poet in the established English tradition. Emerson's essay caught the attention of Walt Whitman, then a newspaperman in Brooklyn. He said that Emerson "set me to a boil." The result was Leaves of Grass (1855). Emerson had called for such a poet--and here he was! He responded with his famous letter to Whitman (July 21, 1855): "I greet you at the beginning of a great career.... I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed ... a great power."

That year, Lincoln, like Emerson, was reading Leaves of Grass, reading it aloud while reclining on the couch in the Springfield law office he shared with William Herndon, Lincoln's long legs extending over the end of the couch. As Daniel Mark Epstein showed in Lincoln and Whitman (2004), Leaves of Grass exerted a profound and singularly poetic effect on Lincoln's oratory, awakened him to the possibilities of language, made him less lawyer-like, his sentences becoming rhythmic, using alliteration, concrete imagery, striking metaphor. In the middle of the 19th century, with Emerson and Whitman behind him, Lincoln gave a new and defining voice to America.

"Four score 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." Matthew Arnold allegedly said that he stopped reading at that point. I doubt it: The momentum, the rhythms, the Scriptural phrasing create a current that carries one powerfully along. Lincoln's first sentence echoes Psalm 90, "The days of our years are three score years and ten." Other language evocative of Scripture--"perish," "consecrate," "hallow," "devotion"--gives Lincoln's 272 concentrated words the weight and authority of an American Psalm. Latent here also is a resurrection metaphor, the "new birth" of freedom rising out of the sacrificial death of those thousands of soldiers buried in the new national cemetery spread out before Lincoln as he spoke. As Douglas Wilson observes, "It would be hard to find a piece of American writing that better fits Emerson's description of [poetry as] a meter-making argument."

Lincoln did pull the basic, Euclidean American "proposition" out of a hat. Stephen Douglas had maintained in his famous 1858 debates with Lincoln that the issue of slavery in the new territories should be decided by majority rule. Lincoln fought back by plucking that phrase from the Declaration. Slavery was wrong: A vote could not make it right, because the slaves, being "men," are equal and have "inalienable rights." That claim gained in authority because it corresponded to Americans' sense of themselves as having equality in the form of liberty and opportunity, and as having an equal voice (vote) in how they are governed. That equal voice was rooted in the New England town meeting and in the Congregational churches. Americans received the "born equal" of the Declaration--what Pauline Maier has called "American scripture"--in a sense that can be called religious. The debate with Lincoln over equal rights was one Stephen Douglas could not win.

An interesting and important argument has swirled around this. In The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970), NATIONAL REVIEW's Willmoore Kendall (with George Carey) argued that Lincoln dangerously "internalized" the "all men are created equal" phrase of the Declaration, applying domestically what the Declaration clearly applied to Americans and Englishmen, both "equally" capable of self-government. The Declaration was claiming the right to national independence. But that "original intent" evaporated during the 1850s, when Lincoln applied it internally to the slaves, who indubitably were "men," and Americans' sense of their own basic equality as individuals could not refuse such equality to "all men." Claims to the contrary by the secessionists had to be judged as made in bad faith. Willmoore Kendall did not and could not win that argument with Lincoln.

Indeed, Lincoln's non-originalist reinterpretation of the Declaration has been prevailing in the self-interpretation of Americans ever since. The idea of equality in Lincoln's sense energized the civil-rights revolution (integration, voting rights)--and also the highly visible, wide, and continuing advance of women's equality. He was a poet-statesman, and his words have power yet.