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“That is without a doubt the most idiotic analysis of the Gettysburg Address I’ve ever seen.”

Others have said the same thing. Only better.

Read what Pulitzer Prize winner and historian Garry Wills wrote:

Lincoln at Gettysburg “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.”

Remember, Wills was an admirer of Lincoln.

Remember, Wills was an admirer of Lincoln.

And you are not, I'm quite aware of that. And your hyperbole aside, I'm still trying to figure out the whole "violent overthrow of the Constitution" claim. The Wills quote certainly doesn't support that, regardless of what the context of the quote actually is.

Sorry I've missed out on this party, sure hope y'all have not dipped too deep into the ole' punch bowl! ;-)

jeffersondem: "Read what Pulitzer Prize winner and historian Garry Wills wrote:

'Lincoln at Gettysburg 'performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting.
Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.
The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them.
They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America.
Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.'

Remember, Wills was an admirer of Lincoln."

First, I highly recommend Garry Wills book: "Negro President, Jefferson and the Slave Power".
It illuminates the question of how the Southern slave-holding minority exercised majority rule in Washington, DC from at least 1800 until secession in 1861.

But, second, as for this particular Wills passage... well...no, not even close.

Early in 1861 the Union army began declaring fugitive slaves "contraband of war", refused to return them and instead employed "contraband" as workers in Union camps.
In January 1862 Thaddeus Stevens introduced legislation, and Congress passed, forbidding the Union army from returning "contraband" to their Confederate owners.
In February 1862, Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic began to be sung by Union citizens & soldiers -- "...as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on."
In August 1862 Lincoln wrote to New York Tribune editor Horrace Greely (in part):
In September 1862 Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, eventually freeing three million slaves in Confederate states.
As a result, Republicans did exceptionally well in the November 1862 elections, picking up Congressional seats in Michigan, California & Iowa, plus five Senate seats.
Historian James McPherson says of 1862: "If the election was in any sense a referendum on emancipation and on Lincoln's conduct of the war, a majority of Northern voters endorsed these policies."[89]
So, by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in November 1863, abolition was already thoroughly accepted as a Civil War policy and goal.
It was far then from a "slight of hand" or "pick pocket"

Indeed, the real "slight of hand" here is the determined work of jeffersondem & others to revise, rewrite and redefine the US Civil War as something vastly different from its historical reality.