Conceived In Liberty: Critical Reflection To The Gettysburg Address By Abraham Lincoln

I do not entirely agree with the opening line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “Conceived in liberty” is a debatable phrase; although our forefathers held liberty to the highest priority in the conception of the United States, they did not intend for liberty to be enjoyed by all humans on the land. Furthermore, I wholeheartedly disagree with the latter half of the statement, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as this was evidently not the case in many clauses of the Constitution regarding the institution of slavery and in American society in general.

In both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, our forefathers made it evident that liberty was of paramount importance. In the Declaration of Independence, our forefathers wrote, “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 there are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is evident in this excerpt that our forefathers felt that ensuring liberty amongst the men of the United States was a central reason for secession from (and thus war with) the British crown. Liberty is also a central theme in the Constitution, in that there are numerous clauses that enforce limitations, separations, and checks and balances on the federal government to minimize the likelihood it would collect enough power to encroach on the liberty of the states.

Furthermore, the presence of ensuring “liberty” in the sense of individual liberty is most obvious in the Bill of Rights, which was amended to the Constitution three years after its inception. In this bill, the freedom of speech, right to keep and bear arms, protection from double jeopardy and self-incrimination, forbiddance of cruel and unusual punishment, and several other pillars of American law and society were established. In sum, it is clear our forefathers placed incredible importance on the ideal of state and individual liberties. Nevertheless, the luxuries of such liberties were unfortunately not enjoyed by everyone in America, largely in thanks to the hypocrisy of the latter half of this line from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Although it is true the “proposition that all men are created equal” appears in the Declaration of Independence, as does the “inalienable right” of liberty, our forefathers most certainly did not intend for these to apply to the nearly 700, 000 slaves living in the United States during the era of the Revolution and signing of the Constitution. In fact, the preservation of the institution of slavery played a notable role in the writing of the Constitution.

Consider the following clause: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States… which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.” This clause is stating that, for representation purposes, slaves shall be counted as three fifths of a free person. Since three-fifths is not equal to one, this clause is mathematical proof our forefathers were not in fact dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. However, it is not entirely fair to criticize our forefathers for these hypocrisies. Consider the economy of the United States at the time of the Constitution.

America was very capital-poor at the time, meaning agriculture was a very large and important portion of the economy, especially in the southern states that were essentially exclusively-agricultural economies. Therefore, since the institution of slavery was indispensable to the economy of the South, the members of the Constitutional Convention had to appease the southern states by inserting certain clauses in the Constitution that were attractive and appropriate for the prosperity of their economies. For example, the “three-fifths” clause noted earlier awarded the southern states with an appropriate amount of representation; if slaves were not counted at all, the northern states would have vastly greater representative power than the southern states, while if slaves were counted as a full individual, the southern states would greatly overpower the northern states given the large slave population in these states. Another clause that favored the southern states can be found in the beginning of Article 1, Section 9, which perfectly preserved the institution of slavery, which was the source of labor that fueled the livelihood of the South, against any form of legislation for twenty years.

Therefore, although I do not agree fully with Lincoln’s address given the blatant hypocrisies of our forefathers values of human equality, their efforts to appease the South to ensure their economic prosperity are reasonably valid given that their first priority during this time was to unite the States under the common rule of law which was the Constitution.