The challenge of Gettysburg

One hundred and forty six years ago on November 19, 1863, during the US civil war, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech to commemorate the gruesome Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and dedicate a national cemetery for slain soldiers.

It was a brief oration that lasted only a few minutes. The Lincoln presentation-272 words- appeared to pale next to the delivery of a well known national orator Professor Edward Everett whose speech running into nearly two hours came ahead of the president’s.

The crowd gave Lincoln what an observer described as a “perfunctory applause”. It was a euphemism for unstated rejection of the speech! But the professional Everett instantly noticed the landing of a new benchmark for oratorical discipline and ingenuity. “My speech will soon be forgotten, “he told Lincoln. “Yours will never be. How gladly would I exchange my hundred pages for your twenty lines”.

It has turned out prophetically true. For through the ages down to our day what started as a mere community speech has since broken the barriers of colour and the culture of language to become a timeless piece of prose better appreciated for its nobility and poetry.

More awe is summoned when we realise that Lincoln gave the address from a grieving soul. There was the stark reality of sorrow inflicted by war. And in this case the Battle of Gettysburg was recorded to have been one of the bloodiest of the civil war.

7000 were killed and 44000 were wounded or missing. Historians claim that the Gettysburg Battle was the turning point indeed of the war.

Somehow Lincoln, a man forged out of a cauldron of defeats, disappointments and rejection drew appropriate lessons from the desolation around him. He recognised for instance that man can only manage calamity (or what seems so) not by pandering to it or reproducing more vision of such dreary conditions.

It wasn’t a time for a long sermonising speech, nor was it a moment to shun talk altogether. He needed to face the locals and comfort the bereaved families of Gettysburg and turn individual and collective losses into first, a national hope and then a universal legacy.

The Gettysburg Address achieved precisely these. How did Lincoln succeed? The literary technique, gained from diligent study and history, performed the main magic. He avoided overtly lugubrious epithets. He never interjected the speech with any personal connections. Where he came to it, the speaker adopted the use of the majestic “we”, “us” or “our”.

He won the hearts of the bereaved and the nation when he cautioned that although he and the others had gathered to honour the dead, “in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground.” Lincoln added: “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, or long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated more to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Great, noble thoughts and vision captured in equally sublime prose. Lincoln ended the day a fulfilled man: he had used powerful language and personal discipline to soothe the souls of the bruised, disconsolate citizens.

He had also proved that when a nation is passing through dreary moments, it could be succoured by leaders that take time to make statements that transform the situation into vision.

Only leaders and statesmen of Spartan dispositions unencumbered by a craving for material wealth, inordinate power and women-mongering would possess the rigour and discipline and conviction so amply displayed in the Gettysburg Address.

Most of what we have in Nigeria has come down as a caricature of the soul of Gettysburg chiefly because our speechmakers are largely the antitheses of Abraham Lincoln. They conduct no studious research ahead of the speeches. They don’t reach back into history to dredge up nuggets of wisdom.

They don’t make issues of speeches, personalising them instead. And most tragically, they are rooted only in today, not looking beyond the present. They have a disdain for a reading lifestyle.

Two leaders in our age have admitted their contempt for reading.

So why won’t we be blessed with leadership with philistine attitudes whose speeches, consisting of a clutter of kilometre -long constructions, can’t inspire us to transcendent hope? Why won’t we have speeches better admitted as tutorials for nursing mothers who want to send their infants to sleep? When we have leaders who maintain harems in almost every constituency where they exercise so-termed legislative oversight functions, we can’t but produce a president who says it is unproductive to turn out sociology graduates.

In such a society, it is patriotic to turn deaf ears to pleas for prompt passage of the Freedom of Information Bill. In this clime it is bliss to avoid the discipline of Gettysburg.