War Lit Abraham Lincoln. \"Gettysburg

¶ … War Lit

Abraham Lincoln. "Gettysburg Address."

The Gettysburg Address marks the finale of the American Civil War. In the address, President Lincoln hearkens to the birth of the nation and its founding principles. Lincoln notes that when the nation was founded "four score and seven years ago," that it was "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln opens with this statement to underscore the importance of the civil war and the central role that slavery played in it.

Lincoln continues to discuss the pivotal role the civil war is playing as a benchmark of American history. Referring to the burial of soldiers who gave their lives to the cause of the war, Lincoln notes that the soldiers did not lose their lives in vain but instead the pursuit of higher ideals. Lincoln concludes that through the trauma of the civil war, the United States will experience a "new birth of freedom." Doing so urges the audience to remember the root causes of the civil war and the reasons why the hundreds of thousands of men died fighting it.

The intended audience of the civil war extends far beyond the audience that actually listened to the speech. Lincoln speaks to posterity, and also to the world beyond the borders of the United States. For example, Lincoln states, "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." The Gettysburg Address encapsulates the spirit of American values, establishes the centrality of the civil war in defining those values, and urges future Americans to heed the civil war's warnings.

2. Robert Hayden's "Frederick Douglass"

Robert Hayden's poem "Frederick Douglass" refers to the former slave whose narrative became a seminal work of African-American literature and one of the most important historical documents in American history. Hayden does not laud Douglass's narrative as a work of literature of historiography. Instead, he writes to poem to discuss the essence of Douglass's work. Until true justice is achieved, and until there is true social equity, Douglass's narrative will remain just a work of history. Hayden dreams of a world in which freedom is second-nature and we no longer need to study slave narratives to know why.

A focal point of the poem is the term "freedom," which is "beautiful and terrible" and as "needful to man as air." Hayden repeats the word "needful" in the last line of the poem to emphasize the necessity of freedom for human life, thereby implying that a life led without freedom is no life at all. Hayden's poem is empowering, as he focuses on the "dream of the beautiful, needful thing" rather than on the bitterness of the enslavement that prompted the poem in the first place.