What is not found in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address says much about what is found there. Lincoln
did not say, “The brave Union men living and dead who struggled here” as well he might have. Instead,
Lincoln speaks without distinction of brave men who struggled there on both sides.
Clearly, Lincoln was looking beyond divisions of war to a day when there would be a reunited
nation offering the blessings of liberty for all.
Now we are engaged in a new civil war raging from dark urban streets to bright elementary
school rooms, rural American towns, and vast, military installations. It is a war taking the lives of mostly
young Americans as did the Civil War in Lincoln’s time. It is a war that inspires passionate debate
concerning interpretations of our Constitution and has divided our fellow countrymen as once the issue
of slavery divided the nation. It is the war of random gun violence.
Emperor Hirohito, after announcing Japan’s surrender in World War Two, removed Napoleon’s
bust from his study and replaced it with one of Abraham Lincoln. He understood Lincoln was a symbol of
all that was best in American goodwill as expressed in the Gettysburg Address.
During American visits, world leaders as diverse as John Paul II and Israeli Prime Minister Begin
cited inspiration they had drawn from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
The guns of 1863 led to a new birth of freedom. Let us be inspired to dedicate ourselves to the
proposition that those dying in today’s gun violence will not have died in vain but through their sacrifice
grant us a new birth of freedom from such tragic violence.
By Tim Hughes