Let's write about November 19th the year 1863 and the Gettysburg Address

 Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American in substack:  

President Abraham Lincoln

Gettysburg, PA- For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.
A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.
They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.
And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.
On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.
The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed to be “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”
“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Gettysburg Address (1863)- Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Let's write about inspired religious art- Fra Angelico (born1395- died 1455)

Can a Painting Make a Skeptic Believe? By Cody Delistraty

Following the death of his mother, the artist Mark Rothko set off on a five-month trip across Europe in 1950, visiting the continent’s great museums. Echo opinion art review published in The New York Times.

The Annunciation- Archangel Gabriel with the Virgin Mary by Fra Angelico

But, it wasn’t until he visited a former Dominican convent in Florence, Italy, that he found what he was looking for.✝️👼😇 👼🏽🙏Each “cell” — where the convent’s friars lived — was adorned with a fresco painted by the 15th-century friar Fra Angelico that captured, Rothko said, what no other art he’d seen could.

“I traveled all over Europe and looked at hundreds of Madonnas,” Rothko wrote to a friend, “but all I saw was the symbol, never the concrete expression of motherhood.” 

With Angelico, though, Rothko recognized an artist of the highest order: Angelico’s paintings transcended representation to transmit deep emotional, spiritual experience.

A major influence on Abstract Expressionists like Rothko, wherein emotional evocation trumped figuration, Angelico’s great gift was his ability to convey a sense of the divine. 

Centuries later, his work invites a skeptic to belief. Angelico’s art has pushed me to find within myself a desire for belief I’d thought had been extinguished long ago.

So strong is Angelico’s own vision, so capable is he of showing it that while his foreign, 15th-century world of asceticism, magic and unconditional faith is at first discombobulating, it is a testament to his artistic ability that even more than half a millennium later, I find myself transported into his way of seeing the world, as though I were a friar in one of his cells.

Angelico began as an illustrator of illuminated manuscripts and had sold a few paintings by the time he joined the convent of San Domenico near Florence, where he took the name Fra Giovanni. (He posthumously gained the “angelic” moniker.) He was a man of deep faith, said to have wept every time he painted Jesus on the cross.

The Dominican friars of Angelico’s order were a particularly disciplined breed, following a 13th-century credo that encouraged extreme austerity. There was no search for meaning in that convent; it was a given. When Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned him to paint many of the frescoes in Angelico’s new convent of San Marco, it’s very likely Angelico didn’t even consider what he was doing to be “art.” His painting was, more than anything, an act of devotion — “visions,” as the art critic John Ruskin would later write.

This fall, I visited a major exhibit — running through January — at the Museo Nazionale di San Marco (where Rothko visited) and the nearby Palazzo Strozzi that brings one into Angelico’s world and faith.

There, you’ll find Angelico’s most stunning work, “The Annunciation,” outside the friars’ cells, up the stairs in the convent, which became a museum in 1869. A large-scale fresco painted in the 1440s, it depicts Mary and the Archangel Gabriel. 

Look first at Gabriel’s wings. Though the light and shadow of the scene are otherwise realistic, Angelico omits the shadows that would otherwise emanate from the angel’s wings, lending Gabriel an other worldliness.

Look next at both Gabriel and Mary’s eyes. Angelico has given the angel a feminized face — neat lashes, reddened cheeks, golden and curly hair. He looks ever so slightly upward at Mary. He is here to deliver impossible news. His eyes pretend toward authority, but mostly he appears puzzled. Mary meets his gaze with a look of her own weighted shock, her lips pursed, her neck arched downward so that she has quietly become the one in control of the conversation, as though, with the exchange of this revelation, she now embodies a divinity greater even than an angel.

Look then at the architecture around them. The ornate, Corinthian columns, the mathematically precise Roman arches. How classical and ordered. What a contrast these exacting, human creations are to the cosmic information being delivered and received by these startlingly modern, expressive faces. It is as though the word of the Virgin birth has slashed its way through art history itself, so that we can practically see the Classical giving way to the early Renaissance.

And though it would have mattered a great deal to Angelico, it matters not to contemporary eyes whether the viewer believes this scene to have ever occurred. It will capture you regardless.

“You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” the novelist Henry James wrote after visiting the former convent, “you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.”

It is this ability to emotionally spellbind the viewer that most sets Angelico apart — imparting belief through art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher, described Angelico’s key artistic invention as interiority: “that indwelling significance of human features.” Angelico did not just depict; he evoked. Before Angelico, one largely found ideas in art, but not necessarily feeling.

Consider, as Hegel does, an ancient Egyptian sculpture of Isis embracing her son, Horus. In this, there is no warmth, no “soul,” writes Hegel. The artist expects the viewer to know that there exists love between these two by the nature of their relationship. The viewer must generate within himself the associated feelings and apply it to the art.

Angelico, by contrast, elicits these emotions — through his depictions of eyes, hands, the use of light and so much else — so that upon looking at his art one is immediately struck by the love and intimacy flowing between his depictions of Virgin and Child or the awe and befuddlement between her and Gabriel in “The Annunciation.” 

Angelico broke through art history by subtracting a crucial step. One does not regard his art, then create feeling, then look again to see that feeling manifest; rather, the seeing and the feeling are simultaneous, as Rothko saw in Angelico’s work. The artwork has become the emotion.

Let's write about the history of the mariners' Underground Railroad to help free Southern slaves

 The Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors by Eric Foner

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom were better below deck than over land.

Freedom Ship:  The Underground History of Escaping Slavery by Sea, author Marcus Rediker. A book review published in the New York Review of Books by Eric Foner*, Emeritus, Columbia.

Of the innumerable images published in American newspapers in the decades before the Civil War, few were as ubiquitous as those depicting a young Black man traveling on foot through a forest (represented by a single tree), his belongings wrapped in a sack attached to a pole slung over his shoulder. Instantly recognizable as a runaway slave, the image was usually accompanied by text providing a physical description of the fugitive, the offer of a reward for his capture, and a warning that anyone who assisted the runaway—or even refused to take part in his capture—risked serious legal consequences.

Thousands of these notices (including those for women
) appeared in print, testimony to American slaves’ intense desire for freedom and their willingness to risk their lives to obtain it. But this familiar depiction, argues the historian Marcus Rediker in his new book, Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea, is misleading, encouraging historians to focus on overland flight, ignoring the fact that “a large proportion” of slaves escaped by boat. Moreover, these advertisements imply that most fugitive slaves were acting on their own, whereas many relied on assistance from sympathetic individuals or organizations such as the Vigilance Committees. Springing into existence in the 1830s, and 1840s, in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other northern cities, they sought to combat an epidemic of kidnapping of northern free Blacks for sale into slavery and to provide help to fugitives. Taken together, these local networks came to be known as the Underground Railroad.

Ironically, the rapid expansion of cotton production in the lower South beginning in the 1820s, not only enriched slave owners, merchants, and bankers, North and South, but also established a web of maritime trading routes that greatly increased fugitives’ opportunities for escape by sea. Hundreds of ships each year carried the South’s “white gold” to the port cities of the Atlantic coast and on to textile factories in New England and Europe. 

Rediker presents some startling statistics that illustrate the growth of seaborne commerce. By the middle of the nineteenth century nearly 200,000 seamen sailed out of the major ports each year, the largest number to and from New York City, which dominated the cotton trade. Some 20,000 of the sailors were African Americans. In 1855 American shipyards produced over two thousand new vessels. That explosion in maritime commerce, a result of slavery’s widening role in the American economy, created more occasions to steal away on ships and rendered obsolete the idea that those who fled the South did so unassisted.

Laws punishing attempted escapes by sea proved difficult to enforce. Captains were supposed to search their ships for runaway slaves, but as the coastal trade expanded this became prohibitively time consuming. The accelerating sectional conflict over the future of slavery, moreover, meant that a growing number of northerners proved willing to abet fugitives. This was especially true of members of the free Black communities that spread after northern states enacted laws for the gradual abolition of slavery. Black men were well positioned to help fugitives hiding on sailing vessels. As sailors, longshoremen, sailmakers, carpenters, and other maritime laborers, Black workers were omnipresent on the docks and aboard ships. Many kept a lookout for fugitives and directed them to people who could help. The presence of Black seamen was especially important for stowaways. Sailors were known to stack the heavy bales of cotton in a way that created spaces where slaves could fit and to provide them with food and water during the voyage.

To be sure, escape by ship carried its own risks. It was easier to hide in the woods than on a small packet boat. If a runaway was discovered, the captain and crew might turn him in for a reward. Nonetheless, Rediker argues, the chances of getting away on one of the innumerable vessels plying the Atlantic trading routes were considerably higher than those of reaching freedom on land. In 1856, Virginia established a Port Police to search all ships heading north from the state, but the officers had only six vessels for patrolling the vast waters of Chesapeake Bay. They were “overwhelmed,” Rediker writes.

Proximity to the sea was crucial for the most celebrated fugitive in American history, Frederick Douglass, whose journey from Maryland to New York in 1838 was immortalized in his three autobiographies. Douglass’s escape from bondage required him to travel by ferry and steamboat as well as by train—all modes of transport much faster than running away on foot. Instead of days or even weeks, it took him less than twenty-four hours to cover the two hundred miles to freedom.

Douglass, Rediker writes, was “a man of the waterfront.” As a youth he spent several years in Baltimore, one of the nation’s leading port cities and home to its largest free Black community. Along with two uncles and two friends, Douglass devised a plan to escape by canoe into Chesapeake Bay and make their way northward. But someone who learned of their intentions betrayed them. Douglass was sent to jail and then to Baltimore by his owner to learn the maritime skill of caulking.

In his second, successful effort at escape, Douglass, in his words “rigged out in sailor style,” was aided by Anna Murray, the free woman he was planning to marry, and by a retired Black sailor who gave him his own “sailor’s protection” identifying him as free. Soon after he reached New York, however, Douglass encountered Jake, a runaway slave he had known in Baltimore, who warned him that slave catchers prowled the city’s streets. A “generous” Black sailor then directed him to David Ruggles, head of the city’s recently established Vigilance Committee. Ruggles arranged for Douglass to travel to New Bedford, Massachusetts, the nation’s whaling capital, whose free Black community had long assisted fugitives—the city was known in antislavery circles as the Fugitive’s Gibraltar. Douglass’s experience drives home the point that escape was not a solo project and that assistance came from both organized networks and strokes of luck, such as Douglass’s encounter with Jake. Rediker also emphasizes the importance of Black (and not a few white) sailors who secretly distributed antislavery documents in southern ports, especially copies of Walker’s Appeal by David Walker, a free person of color from North Carolina who published his powerful condemnation of slavery and racism in 1829. 

Southern state governments outlawed its circulation and tried to restrict the presence of seamen who might distribute it, requiring Black sailors who arrived on ships from the North to be imprisoned while their vessels were in port.

Rediker is especially interested in multiethnic patterns of resistance uniting sailors and dockworkers, including the New York Conspiracy of 1741, which involved Irish, Hispanic, and African participants, and the Knowles Riot in Boston, in which free sailors and slaves fought the press-gangs rounding up seamen for the Royal Navy. The waterfront, he writes, may well have been the most racially and ethnically diverse workplace in the world. Many ships based in the British Isles and North America picked up sailors while in Europe, the Caribbean, and even the Pacific to replace men who had died, been disabled, or deserted.

Over the course of a long and influential scholarly career, Rediker has established himself as a pioneering chronicler of working-class life in the early modern Atlantic world, with an emphasis on those working at sea or on turbulent waterfronts. He has urged historians to include sailors in their accounts of the era’s labor history, rather than slighting them in favor of much-studied early factory workers. He knows the ships, maritime workers, and commercial routes intimately. Rediker brings to life the cacophonous soundscape of the waterfront, with merchants and captains crying out work orders as ships were loaded and unloaded and women, slave and free, loudly hawking baked goods, eggs, and other food to sailors and dockworkers. He identifies an ethos of solidarity among maritime workers, contrasting it with the dog-eat-dog outlook of emerging capitalism. He pays considerable attention to the importance of the suppression of piracy in the emergence of Britain’s seaborne empire and the imposition of discipline on an unruly working class. “Pirate ships,” he has written, were “democratic in an undemocratic age,” offering an example of multiracial accord that helps explain why many white sailors and waterfront workers were willing to assist fugitive slaves.

The titles of Rediker’s previous books suggest these historical preoccupations. They include Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. Perhaps his most widely known work is The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, coauthored with the scholar of British working-class history Peter Linebaugh. The myth of the Hydra—each time Hercules lopped off one of its numerous heads, two new ones took its place—became a commonly employed metaphor for the difficulties authorities encountered in attempting to suppress a recalcitrant working class. Resistance somehow kept springing back to life.

Within this overarching story of capitalist development and working-class struggle, Rediker takes the reader on a tour of port cities in British North America, from Savannah to Boston. In each locale he surveys the activities of free Blacks, slaves, and white abolitionists in assisting fugitives and presents a compendium of dramatic escapes. Unavoidably the book’s structure produces repetition, but Rediker keeps his eye on the main subject—escapes by sea. A few chapters focus on well-known runaways, notably, in addition to Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), a memoir that describes the sexual abuse to which she was subjected by her owner in North Carolina and her eventual escape to the North. Jacobs came from a seagoing family. Three of her uncles were sailors, two of whom escaped by sea. One uncle worked as a steward on a packet ship that sailed regularly between North Carolina and New York City. Jacobs managed to hide for seven years in a small crawl space in the house of her free grandmother. Her wait for a ship to transport her to freedom was excruciating, but many runaways had to remain in hiding before being able to depart on a coastal vessel. In June 1842, one of Jacobs’s uncles succeeded in locating what she calls a “friendly captain,” who transported her on the ten-day voyage to Philadelphia.

Unlike Douglass and Jacobs, most of the individuals whose experiences Rediker relates will be unfamiliar even to the most diligent historians. There’s George (surname unknown), for example, a youth owned by a New Orleans merchant. George must have set some kind of record by stowing away on a ship departing from Louisiana for Boston, a distance of two thousand miles by sea. George had heard people in the Crescent City talk about Boston as an antislavery stronghold, and in August 1846, when he saw the city’s name painted on a ship, he decided to hide on board amid the cargo. One week into the voyage the captain discovered him. It was too late to turn around, so the skipper continued to head for Boston. After the vessel reached the city he contacted his ship’s owner, who agreed to a plan to send George back to New Orleans. Abolitionists tried some innovative legal maneuvers in an effort to free him, some sailors ran interference as they could, and George temporarily slipped his captivity. But efforts to have the fugitive released via a writ of habeas corpus failed, and he was sent back to New Orleans. A subsequent attempt to persuade a grand jury to indict the captain for kidnapping on the grounds that he had unlawfully imprisoned George on his ship also foundered, and the captain was soon back at the helm.

No one knows exactly how many slaves managed to escape bondage. Rediker offers a “conservative estimate” of 15,000 to 20,000 arriving by sea in all ports during the thirty years preceding the Civil War, when the Underground Railroad and cotton shipping were both at their peak. Other historians have proposed figures for escapes of all kinds reaching up to 100,000. Some runaways were recaptured, but successful renditions were costly. Anthony Burns escaped from Virginia by boat in 1854 but was transported back to slavery on a ship from Boston Harbor. To get him there the local authorities required over one thousand armed militia, police, and infantry—hoping to prevent a repetition of events in 1851, when a large, mostly Black crowd rescued the escaped slave Shadrach Minkins from a Boston courthouse and spirited him off to Canada. Rediker devotes an entire chapter to William Powell, who with his wife ran the Colored Seamen’s Boarding House in New York City, a refuge for sailors who needed lodging until they found work at sea and where numerous fugitives were hidden. Rediker describes Powell as a “quintessential waterfront intellectual and activist.” He had sailed the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific and kept detailed records of the over six thousand boarders, including a number of white sailors, that he housed between 1839 and 1851. A prolific writer and speaker, he lectured alongside Douglass. Powell presided at a mass meeting organized by Black New Yorkers to protest the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which exposed free Black people to kidnapping or simply misidentification by courts. Powell himself, along with his wife and seven children, departed for Liverpool in 1851, fearing capture by the law even though none had ever been a slave. They returned to New York after a few years in Great Britain and resumed their work. Powell also became the city’s first Black notary, enabling him to produce “seamen’s protection certificates” like the one Douglass used on his escape.

States tried to impose their authority on the maritime working class but had little success. As noted above they jailed Black sailors who came into port on northern vessels. In 1859, the government of Charleston, fearing that northern sailors lacked sympathy for “our peculiar institutions,” resolved to train poor white youths to become “homegrown” mariners. Nothing came of this effort. Slave owners in Savannah formed the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association to stop fraternization onshore between Black and white maritime workers, who often bought and sold stolen goods.

Penalties for those who aided fugitives were not light. Sailors and captains who were caught were arrested and jailed. In Virginia Captain William Baylis was sentenced to forty years in prison and only freed when Union soldiers liberated Richmond at the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, by the 1850s captains were making what Rediker calls a “business of escape,” charging substantial fees for transporting runaways to the North. Among the most active members of this maritime underground was James Fountain, who had a secret compartment built on his ship, the Chas. T. Ford, where stowaways could hide. A Black ship carpenter worked with Fountain, alerting fugitives when he was sailing. Fountain charged as much as one hundred dollars per fugitive—a substantial sum in those days. He was not averse to carrying groups. On one occasion, in 1856, he transported twenty-one men, women, and children from Norfolk to the North—the largest group escape by sea of the pre-war period.

Freedom Ship joins a burgeoning literature that emphasizes the centrality of the fugitive slave issue in bringing on the Civil War and a smaller but growing literature on the maritime Underground Railroad, including Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander’s Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad and Timothy D. Walker’s edited volume Sailing to Freedom. As early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, debates took place over the responsibility for apprehending runaway slaves. The Constitution required that they be returned to their owners, but exactly how remained unclear. A national law enacted during the presidency of George Washington authorized owners to track down and apprehend fugitives on their own (not always an easy thing to accomplish). Half a century later, efforts to implement the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which transferred responsibility for rendition to the federal government, inspired widespread resistance in the North. Some free states enacted “personal liberty” laws that sought to nullify the national statute by barring local officials from participating in the capture of runaways. These measures showed that the South’s ideology of states’ rights could be invoked to combat abusive national policies (a historical lesson especially relevant at the moment). None of this could have happened without the actions of slaves who sought to escape bondage and the people who helped them.

Given the evidence Rediker accumulates, it should not be surprising that the longest complaint against the North in South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession of 1860 was that the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause had been “render[ed] useless” by popular resistance in the free states. How appropriate that the Civil War began in Charleston Harbor, where the irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery had long been fought on docks piled high with bales of cotton and on ships that daily sailed past the looming presence of Fort Sumter, some of them carrying hidden fugitives on their way to freedom.

*Eric Foner:  The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which won the 2011, Pulitzer Prize for History, and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. (October 2025)