In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term people to actually mean. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational.
In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. There is nothing extreme in this statement.
This article is adapted from Coates’s forthcoming book.
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