Conclusion

Did the Gettysburg Address remake America as Garry Wills suggests? Lincoln, of course, did not live to see the new nation given birth to by the trauma of Civil War. AfterLincoln's assassination in April of 1865, Americans--Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites--struggled bitterly over issues of race and reunification.

Within only a few decades of Lincoln's call for a new birth of freedom, southern blacks faced de facto re-enslavement through the economic oppression of farm tenancy, disenfranchisement, and social segregation enforced with equal doses of law and vigilante violence. By 1900 the U.S. Constitution was once again held to exclude blacks from its promise of liberty and justice for all.