The subject [the Constitution] speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
If I had just read that selection and didn't know where it's from or when it was written, I would have thought it was written during the US civil war after November 19, 1863, because of its emphasis on maintaining the union and it's powerful echo of Lincoln's theme in the Gettysburg Address that the US civil war was an existential test to see if representative government "could long endure."
But I would have had it backwards. I encountered this quotation when I was listening last night to the last lecture of Yale Professor Joanne B. Freeman's course on the American Revolution (free via iTunesU). In it, she quotes the selection above from the opening paragraph of Hamilton's Federalist #1.
As soon as I heard those lines, especially perhaps because I was hearing them as opposed to reading them, and perhaps because we are just reaching the end of the term in my "US History to the Civil War" class, I thought, "That's amazing. That in essence is one of the core messages of the Gettysburg Address."
As for the parallels, Hamilton says, the question is "... whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government..." or whether force will rule. in the Address, Lincoln said, "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." Hamilton and Lincoln both frame the issue as a test, not just of the US republic, but of the philosophical proposition of whether, as Lincoln concludes, we have the "resolve" to insure that "...government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
Hamilton also prefigured the idea that it is up to the people to decide the claim of whether such a government can survive, since this question is "reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example...."
Of course, Lincoln is also reprising this theme in Pericle's famous funeral oration from The Peloponnesian War. And certainly the Gettysburg Address, in particular in Lincoln's commemoration of dead soldiers, is primarily based on Pericle's model. Lincoln's debt to Pericles is well known.
Perhaps there is even a glimmer of a reference to Hamilton's first Federalist Paper in Lincoln's famous proclamation of "a new birth of freedom," but this may be more of a stretch. Hamilton used the metaphor of adoption instead of birth, but he says in Federalist #1 that future Federalist Papers will discuss how "...adoption will afford to the preservation of that species of government, to liberty, and to property."
Hamilton also presciently warned, in Federalist #1, against those, who "will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government." He concludes with another warning against disunion, claiming:
It may perhaps be thought superfluous to offer arguments to prove the utility of the UNION, a point, no doubt, deeply engraved on the hearts of the great body of the people in every State, and one, which it may be imagined, has no adversaries. But the fact is, that we already hear it whispered in the private circles of those who oppose the new Constitution, that the thirteen States are of too great extent for any general system, and that we must of necessity resort to separate confederacies of distinct portions of the whole.
These passages would certainly have resonated with anyone reading them during the US civil war, in particular, one could speculate, to Lincoln.
I know that there has been a tremendous amount written about Gettysburg and the Gettysburg address and I'm not a scholar of the period. I also personally am more drawn to less war-glorifying accounts, for example the vivid testimony given by 15 year-old eyewitness to the battle Tillie Pierce, or the astonishing report of NYT Washington correspondent Samuel Wilkeson, who wrote his report, (PDF, bottom of first and second pages) even though one of his son's had been killed in the second day of the battle (h/t to John Carey, editor of Eyewitness to History).
So, I doubt the idea that the Gettysburg Address is partially drawn from the Federalst #1 is original to me, but I have not yet found such a reference. In Gary Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, according to Amazon.com's Search Inside this Book, "Federalist" is not mentioned ("Pericles" is mentioned 22 times). There were no references to Lincoln, except in Wills' biographical note, in Wills' book on the Federalist Papers, Explaining America. Similarly, there are no references to the Federalist Papers as a source for the Address in either Gabor Borritt's The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows or in James M. McPherson's Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. In a quick search of scholarly articles using JSTOR, I came up similarly empty.
I know Lincoln was an avid reader of histories of the early republic. The research he did on the "founders" legislative actions restricting slavery for his famous Cooper Union speech (http://showcase.netins.net/...), in which he demolishes the (a)historical claims of Chief Justice Taney's infamous decision in the Dred Scott case, was quite impressive. However, I don't even know for sure that Lincoln read the Federalist papers, though I would be quite surprised if he hadn't.
What do you think of the parallels drawn here? Does anyone else know of scholarship drawing connections between the Gettysburg address and the Federalist #1 or between Lincoln and the Federalist Papers in general?