The cooperhead.
Posted on 11/15/2013 11:16:55 AM PST by nickcarraway
Seven score and ten years ago, the forefathers of this media institution brought forth to its audience a judgment so flawed, so tainted by hubris, so lacking in the perspective history would bring, that it cannot remain unaddressed in our archives.
We write today in reconsideration of “The Gettysburg Address,” delivered by then-President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the greatest conflict seen on American soil. Our predecessors, perhaps under the influence of partisanship, or of strong drink, as was common in the profession at the time, called President Lincoln’s words “silly remarks,” deserving “a veil of oblivion,” apparently believing it an indifferent and altogether ordinary message, unremarkable in eloquence and uninspiring in its brevity.
CONNECT WITH US
On Twitter or Facebook:
• Like PennLive on Facebook
And check out our mobile site by visiting PennLive.com from any mobile browser.
In the fullness of time, we have come to a different conclusion. No mere utterance, then or now, could do justice to the soaring heights of language Mr. Lincoln reached that day. By today’s words alone, we cannot exalt, we cannot hallow, we cannot venerate this sacred text, for a grateful nation long ago came to view those words with reverence, without guidance from this chagrined member of the mainstream media.
The world will little note nor long remember our emendation of this institution’s record – but we must do as conscience demands:
| Tuesday, Nov. 24, 1863 | Editorial
A Voice from the Dead We have read the oration of Mr. Everett. We have read the little speeches of President Lincoln, as reported for and published in his party press, and we have read the remarks of the Hon. Secretary of State, Wm. H. Seward, all delivered on the occasion of dedicating the National Cemetery, a plot of ground set apart for the burial of the dead who fell at Gettysburg in the memorable strife which occurred there between the forces of the Federal Government and the troops of the Confederacy of seceded States.
To say of Mr. Everett's oration that it rose to the height which the occasion demanded, or to say of the President's remarks that they fell below our expectations, would be alike false. Neither the orator nor the jester surprised or deceived us. Whatever may be Mr. Everett's failings he does not lack sense - whatever may be the President's virtues, he does not possess sense. Mr. Everett failed as an orator, because the occasion was a mockery, and he knew it, and the President succeeded, because he acted naturally, without sense and without constraint, in a panorama which was gotten up more for his benefit and the benefit of his party than for the glory of the nation and the honor of the dead.
We can readily conceive that the thousands who went there went as mourners, to view the burial place of their dead, to consecrate, so far as human agency could, the ground in which the slain heroes of the nation, standing in relationship to them of fathers, husbands, brothers, or connected by even remoter ties of marriage or consanguinity, were to be interred. To them the occasion was solemn; with them the motive was honest, earnest and honorable. But how was it with the chief actors in the pageant, who had no dead buried, or to be buried there; from none of whose loins had sprung a solitary hero, living or dead, of this war which was begotten of their fanaticism and has been ruled by their whims? They stood there, upon that ground, not with hearts stricken with grief or elated by ideas of true glory, but coldly calculating the political advantages which might be derived from the solemn ceremonies of the dedication.
We will not include in this category of heartless men the orator of the day; but evidently he was paralyzed by the knowledge that he was surrounded by unfeeling, mercenary men, ready to sacrifice their country and the liberties of their countrymen for the base purpose of retaining power and accumulating wealth. Hi oration was therefore cold, insipid, unworthy the occasion and the man.
We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.
But the Secretary of State is a man of note. He it was who first fulminated the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict; and on the battle field and burial ground of Gettysburg he did not hesitate to re-open the bleeding wound, and proclaim anew the fearful doctrine that we are fighting all these bloody battles, which have drenched our land in gore, to upset the Constitution, emancipate the negro and bind the white man in the chains of despotism.
On that ground which should have been sacred from the pollution of politics, even the highest magnate in the land, next to the President himself, did not hesitate to proclaim the political policy and fixed purpose of the administration; a policy which if adhered to will require more ground than Gettysburg to hold our dead, and which must end in the ruin of the nation. The dead of Gettysburg will speak from their tombs; they will raise their voices against this great wickedness and implore our rulers to discard from their councils the folly which is destroying us, and return to the wise doctrines of the Fathers, to the pleadings of Christianity, to the compromises of the Constitution, which can alone save us. Let our rulers hearken to the dead, if they will not to the living - for from every tomb which covers a dead soldier, if they listen attentively they will hear a solemn sound invoking them to renounce partisanship for patriotism, and to save the country from the misery and desolation which, under their present policy, is inevitable.
Perhaps in another hundred years, they will discover the folly of most of the words they are currently writing.
ummmm, strong drink is still way common in the journalist “profession”.
they get into that in college. wild partiers. easy classes.
I really like the Gettysburg Address. It flows so beautifully from beginning to end, and says so much in each word, phrase and in its profundity. Lincoln was truly a great thinker and writer.
Yet even in spite of the tragedy of damned slavery which led to that horrible war, as in the least it is, had I not already been there, I would have gone South.
Sounds like the Patriot & Union was an organ of the Democratic Party or perhaps even Cooperheads. Back then papers were explicitly partisan with none of today’s platitudes about being objective.
Mainstream media’s been in the tank against the USA since Lincoln. That makes sense.
Sadly, the editorial they ‘retracted’ showed more sense and bravery than the current editors display. The Gettysburg Address was meant to have, and did have, a political purpose with which the publishers at the time disagreed. To dismiss their legitimate concerns as the product of strong drink displays not only historical ignorance, but lack of empathy.
Lincoln’s detractors may have been cynical, but their heirs seem to be foolish and heartless.
In the Antebellum era, southern Pennsylvania was Democratic country or “Doughboy” country (Northerners with Southern sympathies). James Buchanan was from southern PA on the border with Maryland. Not surprised the paper of Gettysburg were Cooperheads.
One of the more interesting articles I've read was about all the newspaper buildings that were burned to the ground after the public heard of Lincoln's assassination. There was even one burned down in Medford, Oregon.
The cooperhead.
150 years later, a retraction.
Maybe, just maybe, sometime in 2151,
will the NYT will figure out that Bush didn’t say that Iraq HAD WMDs, rather that their posession was imminent?
I’m afraid there is no way to stave off the cooperheads.
The editorial denounces politicians’ orating at funerals, but the tradition goes back at least to Pericles.
Really? I see a lot of abuse of Lincoln and the war, but not much serious discussion of ideas or specific policies. I understand that they felt emotional about the war, but if the paper had taken the high road back in 1863, maybe the current editors wouldn't feel the need to retract now.
That’s pretty good; thanks for posting!
Ha!
A "doughboy" was a World War One US infantryman.
You are thinking of "Dough-faced" northerners, a term of derision coined by Virginia Congressman John Randolf, circa 1820.
These "Dough-faced" northerners, of whom President Buchanan from South-central Pennsylvania was certainly one, were necessary & essential to holding the Union together for 40 years -- from the 1820s until 1860.
Most were northern Democrats, but some were Whigs, and it was the political elimination of the Dough-faces by anti-slavery Republicans which ended the ante-bellum Union, and led to Civil War.
From the Founding of the Republic through the election of 1856, Pennsylvanians had always voted with Southern Democrats, and so it's not surprising that a Harrisburg newspaper would naturally want to belittle Republicans in 1863 -- just as they do today.
Pennsylvania voters' dramatic change in 1860 from pro-slavery Democrats to anti-slavery Republicans was doubtless just one more straw that broke the camel's back of Southern Unionism.
I doubt MSNBC will ever issue a retraction for having taken the low road. ;~))
Here's another bit of political slander in the service of the Socialist Democrats I saw in the local left-wing rag this morning.
Not only is it a blatant lie that food stamps were cut (although they could be significantly reduced if our 'public servants were to eliminate the high percentage of fraud in the program) but is is a naked attempt by a so-called news outlet to parrot the propaganda of their preferred political party.
Nothing much has changed since 1863.
A Massachusetts soldier quartered at the Lee family mansion in Arlington, VA, wrote this to his hometown newspaper, the Courier & Gazette in Greenfield, MA, published on 15 June 1863:
“At the cook house for the overseer’s family I noticed an octoroon, nearly white, with fine features. She told me that her mother, long since dead was a quadroon and Gen. Lee’s housekeeper at Arlington, and to the question, ‘Was your father a colored man?’ she answered without hesitation ‘No,–master’s my father.” And this father and master now leads an army, the sole purpose of which is to establish a government founded on an institution which enslaves his own children, making his own flesh and blood saleable property!”
The accuracy of the report is impossible to verify, but it’s eyewitness testimony. It’s also not out of keeping with the traditions of Southern slaveholding.
Read what Mary Chestnut wrote in her diary, “A CONFEDERATE LADY’S DIARY”:
“God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system & wrong & iniquity ... This is only what I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children-& every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own.”
If it was learned that Lee actually made a slave of his own child, then his face should be chiseled off Stone Mountain. That kind of example would be one to show the nature of “honor” in the worst kind of tyrant.
And that has to do with what I wrote how?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.