Lincoln, Sun Yat-sen and the Gettysburg Address (and Theodore Parker)

Following a talk on Lincoln at the William S. Richardson School of Law here in Honolulu, I had a discussion with Lincoln scholar, collector and Bicentennial Commission member Justice Frank J. Williams about Lincoln and Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China. Williams wrote about the nexus between Sun and Lincoln in his book and mentioned that it was in school in Honolulu where Sun came across Lincoln.

Sun, probably the most notable Punahou graduate until President Obama, was very taken by Lincoln’s formulation (more on this below) from the Gettysburg Address: “government of the people, for the people, by the people” and used it as inspiration for his “Three People’s Principles:” minzu: nationalism, minquan: democracy, minsheng: people’s welfare/livelihood (Thanks to Professor Oliver Lee for the transliterations/translations). As one can see from the stamp above (see more about it here), Lincoln paired with Sun was marshaled in symbolic support of the Republic of China against Imperial Japan in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. A set of Taiwanese stamps produced in 1959 featured Sun Yat-sen and Lincoln in honor of the Lincoln Centennial.

On Lincoln’s formulation “government of the people, for the people, by the people,” it is not Lincoln’s but John Wycliffe’s. Or at least the political philosopher Eric Voegelin was sure of as much when he wrote in 1970 to the conservative Lincoln critic M.E. Bradford: “Lincoln’s government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ is even more than a millenarian blasphemy than becomes apparent from your paper. The formula is taken from the prologue to the Bible translation, where Wycliffe speaks of the Bible as the book of wisdom ‘of the people, for the people, for the people’ (I am quoting from memory—I am sure you will find the exact reference in Bartlett’s Quotations).” Although Voegelin did not mention Lincoln, he effectively retracted this statement three years later in responding to Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa who had asked about the source of the supposed Wycliffe quote. In any event, Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon leaves no ambiguity as to where the Lincoln formulation in the Gettysburg Address came from. In his Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Herndon states that Lincoln read and underlined a phrase in Theodore Parker’s speech “The Effect of Slavery on the American People” (July 4, 1858) which Herndon had borrowed and gave to Lincoln to read. This is the line Lincoln underlined: “Democracy is self-government, over all the people, by all the people, for all the people.” John White Chadwick, a clergyman who had written a book about Theodore Parker, had already seemingly decided the matter in 1901 in a letter to the Review of Reviews. Res ipsa loquitur.