Why Lincoln Rejected Triumph at gettysburg

‍A few days after July 4, 1863, loyal citizens descended on the White House. They were exhausted by months of terrible news from the battlefront. Still, they rejoiced at the glad tidings dribbling in from a sleepy though now-blood-drenched Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. The telegraph offices also clattered joyful bulletins that the Confederate-held Mississippi River fortress at Vicksburg had finally fallen. The exuberant occasion demanded remarks from the president.

The crowd expected their hardened captain to glory in triumph. But Abraham Lincoln did no such thing. He had spent the better part of the past year pondering God’s imperceptible will. Why had this dreadful war come, he wondered, and how might the republic quell the unholy rebellion? Lincoln could not fully answer these questions. He gambled earlier in the year that a committed war against slavery might find God’s favor. Perhaps, though perhaps not. But now the nation’s loyal legions had delivered twin blows against the aristocratic slave drivers. Had Providence finally smiled on the cause of Union?

‍Though the people came to celebrate, Lincoln declined their cheers. “I will not say I thank you for this call,” he responded. “But I do most sincerely thank Almighty God for the occasion on which you have called.” The “occasion” was the near-mystical coincidence of Union battlefield victories falling on the nation’s birthday. Some “eighty odd years” previously, the president mused, for the first time in the history of the world, an inspired cohort had “assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” The Union’s gory triumphs “now, on this last Fourth of July just passed,” forestalled the Confederate attempt “to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal.” The past and present were bound as one, the founding spirit of the departed fathers living through their devoted offspring.

‍In offering public thanksgiving, Lincoln conveyed his sense of gratitude. In its classical conception, gratitude is the thankful recognition of unearned good, expressed in the reciprocal will to act in accordance with that good. “This one virtue is not only the greatest,” wrote Cicero, “but is also the parent of all the other virtues.” Lincoln saw gratitude as essential to sustaining a free republic