Donald Trump reportedly considered giving his acceptance speech next week at Gettysburg, but it was Barack Obama who delivered a Gettysburg-esque address on the third day of the Democratic convention.

The part of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address that may sound a little strange to modern ears is his linkage of the as-yet-undecided outcome of the Civil War to the prospects of democracy itself. The battle, he said, was a test of whether "any nation so conceived [in liberty] and so dedicated [to the proposition that all men are created equal] could long endure." Lincoln closed by exhorting his listeners—the nation—to work to ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Familiar words, but did Lincoln really believe, did Northern soldiers believe, did the North believe that government by the people would actually be imperiled if the South won?

Yes, they did. Historians who’ve read the soldiers’ letters and their families’ letters and their newspapers have concluded that most Northern troops fought and died not for abolitionism, or at least, not until it became clear that winning the war required emancipation. They fought for the belief that the United States was then the world’s only experiment in popular sovereignty, and that if it broke apart, it would deal a mortal blow to the democratic model. European powers had brutally suppressed any democratic green shoots after the failed revolutions of 1848; America, the North viewed, stood alone. So in asserting that democracy itself was at stake on Cemetery Ridge, Lincoln gave voice not just to his own hopes and fears, but those of his soldiers and the North generally.

Which is why Barack Obama’s remarkable speech on Wednesday night was the most Lincolnesque that he, or any post-Lincoln American, has ever given. He gave his long-muted voice not just to his presentiments about the authoritarian threat that Donald Trump has posed to the nation, and what horrors of racism, irrationality, and brutality may follow should Trump be re-elected, but to the fears of millions that American democracy itself is on the line in November. And like Lincoln at Gettysburg, Obama defined the stakes of the conflict threatening the nation more logically, more compellingly, and more movingly than anyone else could have.

In a sense, Republicans have been warring on popular sovereignty for years, as the nation has grown more racially diverse, and America’s young have grown up in a world where mere sentience produces progressivism. As a consequence, the fundamental precept of the Republican Party has become whatever it takes to preserve their minority rule. Its Supreme Court justices trash the Voting Rights Act. Its election officials throw minority and young voters off the rolls. Its very existence relies on the Electoral College and the Senate, two 18th-century institutions established to create governments freed from popular rule. As with everything he touches, Trump is the logical end point of the party’s fear of popular sovereignty, and an uglier one cannot be imagined. If denying the franchise to minorities and immigrants and city dwellers and the like has no basis in law or democratic values, Trump’s response is to demonize them, vilify them, lie about them, encourage his henchmen to close their polling places and stop their mail. That Trump actually is a racist and encourages racism in his followers only makes his attacks more vehement.

In his speech, Obama attacked Trump’s incompetence and indifference, but his chief critique was Trump’s failure to understand, appreciate, and uphold the nation’s democratic essence, flawed and incomplete as it may be. He cited Trump’s abuses of democratic rights—to assemble, to protest, to vote. To the potential voters that the convention had largely failed to address until Wednesday, those under 30, Obama noted that they appeared to be the first generation in the nation’s history that truly wishes to purge the country of its racism and move it toward economic justice. As Lincoln told the nation that it could either expand democracy with the "new birth of freedom" that was emancipation or risk losing it altogether, so Obama told the young that they could make American democracy more real by continuing their fight, or risk losing it altogether should Trump win.

"You can give our democracy new meaning," he said. "You can take it to a better place. You’re the missing ingredient, the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed … That work will continue long after this election. But any chance of success depends entirely on the outcome of this election. This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win."

Obama concluded with a notably Lincolnesque line: "What we do echoes through the generations."

Besides Obama’s impassioned talk, the one other element of the Democrats’ third session that will echo down generations was Kamala Harris’s nomination as the party’s vice-presidential candidate, because of who she is and what she represents. Her speech—conceived as all such speeches are, as a way to introduce herself to the American public as a relatable and competent leader—met those goals without reaching any oratorical heights, though to say that Obama was a tough act to follow is to understate.

The rest of the evening worked rather well, focusing on roughly outlining the party’s and the ticket’s stance on gun control, immigration and immigrant rights, women’s rights, the climate crisis and environmental justice, and rebuilding the economy, with Elizabeth Warren very effectively making the case for one of Joe Biden’s most progressive positions: investing in child care as a necessary component of the nation’s infrastructure.

But at a time when the nation sometimes seems on the brink of a second irreconcilable conflict, it was Obama, finally, who defined what this election is most deeply about, much as Lincoln, at Gettysburg, defined the meaning of the Civil War.