The U.S. Mint has come out with a new quarter portraying Lincoln on the obverse and clinching hands and arms as if the nation was really reunited by that bloodiest of all American wars.

But the real meaning of the war was captured concisely by H.L. Mencken’s 1920 column. Here it is:

The Gettysburg Address

‘The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whooping of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly

It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection; the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases.

Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

Poetry and Logic

Right: H. L. Mencken.

‘But let us not forget that the Gettysburg Address is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday.

The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination, that government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ should not perish from the earth.

‘It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue.

‘The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

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What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States?

The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country.

For nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.’

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