The Meaning of the Gettysburg Address

[Bill Richter]

To Jerry Madonna (and others),

The quotes of my earlier posting that many of you are using pro and con come from the intro to my book An Historical Dictionary of the Old South (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2006) which I am revising into an expanded second edition at the present time. You may of course quote anything I have written so long as you give me credit for my views in the usual academic footnote or something similar. The intro in the revised volume will be essentially the same as in the old. It is an essay that explains the Civil War from a different viewpoint, one that I used in Sic Semper Tyrannis with John Wilkes Booth, but with a different emphasis. The newer intro will also rely on William Cooper's article, "The Critical Signpost on the Journey toward Secession,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (February 2011), 3-16, now expanded into a book, “We Have the War Upon Us”: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861 (New York: Knopf, 2012), which points out that all attempts to compromise the War foundered upon Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to go against the Republican Platform of 1860 and adopt the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott opinion; namely, that slavery could not be kept out of the western territories before statehood.