Teaching the Gettysburg Address: A Critique

The Address is an icon, and as such has become an essential part of the American political system's religitimization process. Its remarkable effectiveness in this role is largely due to its literary form being borrowed from Biblical covenent renewal ceremonies. But we have paid a high price for this effectiveness. The Address is essentially misleading about the nation's founding and simply wrong about the democratic character of our political institutions. Most important, it ignores the issue of slavery - which one way or another lay at the heart of the civil war struggle - and it perpetuates the lie that the nation was founded on the principle that all men were created equal.