Gettysburg Address

[Don1946]

(11-16-2015 01:55 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(05-25-2015 11:50 AM)LincolnMan Wrote:  Very interesting history. Also, some don't know that the "of the people, by the people, for the people" reference in the Gettysburg Address is not original to Lincoln.

Here are a couple of previous statements:

In 1384 John Wycliffe said, "This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people.”

In 1830 Daniel Webster described the federal government as: "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people."

Roger and others, I found that variations on the of/by/for the people go back to the French Revolution and the republican tradition in France that continued to call for government "par le peuple et pour le peuple." Among the most widely known precedent, however, was Giuseppe Mazzini's 1833 summons to Young Italy "“in the name of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Again in 1851, Mazzini asked: “What does it mean if not a living Equality, in other words, Republic of the People, by the people, and for the people?" By the way an Italian admirer, Repetti, sent Lincoln the complete works of Mazzini during his presidency.
I dug into this in an essay for Sean Conant's new collection, a companion volume to the film on the Gettysburg Address that is about to appear. See my essay: “Widely Noted and Long Remembered: The Gettysburg Address Around the World,” in Sean Conant, ed., _The Gettysburg Address: Perspectives on Lincoln's Greatest Speech_. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 274-299. My point was not that Lincoln plagiarized but that he was engaging the language of international republicanism, and that is why the speech would resonate so widely and for so long.