2 - Lincoln and Historiography

Summary

The Gettysburg Address radically transformed the meaning of the words “all men are created equal.” Lincoln was displaying the Machiavellian traits of lion and fox. As a lion, he had already spoken with the Army of the Potomac; now Lincoln the fox was masking his “great civil war” as a test of the nation’s founding “proposition that all men are created equal.” His Gettysburg Address was an answer to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s obiter dictum, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that the words of the Declaration of Independence “would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.”