For some reason, I burst into tears in the middle of leading a freshman seminar discussion about the Civil War today. I had prepped several of Lincoln’s speeches, excerpts from a Southern Woman’s diary, and a part of a slave memoir from the early 1900s. The discussion went well, and because I teach my students pragmatic method (a way to approach social problem solving, based in John Dewey’s cognitive philosophy), I saved the Gettysburg address to the end.

Two things stand out and map onto other things we’ve been stressing in seminar this semester. 1) Lincoln makes a value claim in the brief piece, which he supports in a brilliant turn of rhetoric (but no real argumentation for why we *should* accept those values. It boils down to the “proposition that all men are created equal.” And he ends with a conclusion that equal people deserve a government by for and of the people. 2) He saw the nation as a work in progress, an end-in-view, a project that together we could work out. He calls America “unfinished” and says that the question is open as to whether or not a people who believe that all are equal can survive over time. He argues, without distinguishing between north and south, that the blood of the fallen answer in the affirmative, and whether or not the nation succeeds, their blood has hallowed the ground where they fell for believing it could.

I tried to read it aloud to the students after asking them a set of thought questions and found myself unable to speak by half way through (I’m one of *those* people who cannot cry and talk at the same time without sounding like a complete retard). It was very “Dead Poets Society” with me bawling my way through the last few lines and the students cheering at the end. But why was it so moving in the first place? I’m not sure. Partly the rhetoric was so beautifully done (images of dead and blood for the ideals; very much like Thomas Paine’s “American Crisis”). But that usually isn’t enough to make me make a fool of myself in front of 35 18-year-olds. Part of it was the idea of working collectively toward living out the proposition that all men are created equal, which I firmly believe in as a worthy (and maybe necessarily) goal for society. And part of it is the notion that here we are, nearly 209 years after the Constitution and 232 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, and we are still an unfinished nation. Intellectually, I think that this is the best way for a democracy to be, unfinished; as soon as a democratic culture believes it has arrived, it will, by definition fail, because it will cease examining itself and end by leaving people behind. But emotionally, I find that I’m saddened not that we’re still working on the nation, but that we’re still working out the same fractures and inequalities that had existed when Lincoln gave his address.