Like many great orations, Barack Obama’s victory speech on Tuesday night was deceptively simple. As powerful as it was to hear, the hidden complexities and import of the president-elect’s words surface only after we re-read the text and think back on the moment.
A confirmed fan of Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Obama drew on another flawless speech, the Gettysburg Address (pdf) (“a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from the earth”), while also celebrating both the inherited majesty of the Democratic process and his own achievement — the broad coalition that elected him.
He echoed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ( “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’’) when he praised the electorate for rejecting the rhetoric of fear and for “ put[ting] their hands on the arc of history and bend[ing] it once more toward the hope of a better day.’’
But this remarkable speaker had more on his mind than classical citations. Woven through his address was nothing less than an attempt to broaden the meaning of America’s founding documents - and its living democracy - by expanding the list of the people who come to mind when Americans think of “the Founders.’’
This mission is evident in the opening stanza:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our Founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
By this he meant to include the many men and women — Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King — who have worked and sometimes died in the fight to extend the full rights of citizenship to people (African-American and female) who were initially denied them. He implicitly credited these women’s rights and civil rights giants with working to create a more perfect union.
In other words, he was including the white fathers — but not only them.
The speech recognized Thomas Jefferson and the framers of the Constitution. It leaned heavily on Lincoln, who orchestrated a second founding by reuniting a sundered nation through the Civil War and pointing the country toward the abolition of slavery.
Still, Mr. Obama knows full well that neither Jefferson nor Lincoln ever “dreamed” of an America in which a person of African descent would ascend to the highest office in the land.
Jefferson, like many of his most influential contemporaries, hewed to the idea that black people would be forever set apart from their fellow citizens. Had it been in his power, black slaves would have been trained, set free, and sent to live apart in Africa or the West Indies.
Virginians took this notion seriously. Seven years after Jefferson’s death, for example, the state legislature conducted a special census to determine if free people of color would agree to leave the state and be resettled in Africa. Among the Negroes who declined to go were Jefferson’s long-time slave and lover Sally Hemings and Jefferson’s two Negro sons, Madison and Eston Hemings.
Paradoxically, Sally, Madison and Eston Hemings had more white than black ancestry — and had actually been counted as free white people in a previous census. But like many people of color in that period, they found that membership in the majority was tenuous and easily revoked. Leaving Virginia for Ohio after their mother’s death, Madison and Eston found their rights as citizens increasingly curtailed.
Lincoln, too, believed in colonization. Speaking to a group of black dignitaries in 1862, he argued that blacks and whites could never live together harmoniously and said: “If this be admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.’’ He argued for colonization in a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation, which began circulating that same year. But the passage was dropped from the final version after Lincoln failed to find political support for it.
The proclamation was a tactical military document, forged in heat of the Civil War, that was intended to improve the Union’s chance of winning. It ended slavery in the states that were in rebellion, while preserving it the border states that had sided with the Union and other areas that were under Union control. Even so, the final document (pdf) allowed that emancipation was “an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution.’’
Slavery was abolished with the ratification of 13th Amendment in 1865. But it took another 100 years — and more work by a subsequent set of Founders — before black Americans and women could fully claim the rights articulated in the founding documents.
That claim had yet to be fully exercised in the summer of 1963, when Dr. King delivered the “I Have a Dream Speech” at the March On Washington.
As Dr. King said at the time:
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
Some listeners heard hints of grandiosity in Mr. Obama’s assertion that this election proved that “the dream of our Founders is alive in our time.’’ But he was clearly referring to the founding ideals as they were improved upon and transfused through subsequent generations of founders who, like King, worked toward the “more perfect union” that Lincoln himself had talked about.
Mr. Obama’s moment would not have been possible without the interventions of those latter-day founders.
