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Lincoln Invited to Gettysburg to Consecrate a
Civil War Cemetery, November 19, 1863
On November 2, 1863, several months after the battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3), David Wills invited President Lincoln to make a "few appropriate remarks" at the consecration of a cemetery for the Union war dead. In early July, Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin had charged Wills, a successful local citizen and judge, with cleaning up the horrible aftermath of the battle: wounded soldiers crammed into every available building, and thousands of swollen dead strewn among hundreds of bloated dead horses.
With the approval of the governor and the eighteen states whose sons were among the dead, Wills quickly acquired seventeen acres for the national cemetery and had the Germantown landscape architect, William Saunders, draw up a plan. Burial began not long after. On September 23, Wills invited the venerable Edward Everett, the nation's foremost rhetorician, to give an oration at the dedication ceremony planned for October 23. Everett accepted, but, needing more time to prepare, persuaded Wills to postpone the ceremony to November 19.
Although Wills wrote his invitation to Lincoln only three weeks prior to the dedication -- prompting speculation among historians about his and Governor Curtin's motivations -- there is evidence that Lincoln was fully apprised of the affair in early October. Further, Wills's invitation included a warm welcome to the president to stay at his house, along with Everett and Curtin.
Lincoln accepted the invitation, probably viewing it as an appropriate time to honor all those who had given their lives in the Civil War. He may also have seen the dedication as an opportunity to reveal his evolving thinking about the War, as a fight not only to save the Union, but also to establish freedom and equality for all under the law. These ideas are central to the speech Lincoln gave at Gettysburg, which, despite its brevity, as opposed to Edward Everett's long-forgotten two-hour oration, has become one of the most memorable of all time.
The Gettysburg Address
For three days in July 1863, Union and Confederate forces fought fierce battles at and near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Union turned back one of the last major thrusts of the Confederate troops toward the North. Many consider it the turning point in the war; after Gettysburg, the South had to fight a defensive war that was doomed to fail.
In November of that same year, a battlefield cemetery was dedicated at Gettysburg. Edward Everett, a well-regarded and prominent speaker, was the main feature of the event. President Lincoln followed Everett's two hour speech with what came to be known as the Gettysburg Address. In about two minutes, Lincoln gave his speech; though the newspapers of the time had much to say about Everett's speech and relegated Lincoln to the back pages, Everett himself recognized the beauty of the simple elegance of Lincoln's words, and told the President as much in a note he wrote to him the next day.
Delivered at Gettysburg
on November 19, 1863
The Only Known Photograph of President Lincoln
at the dedication of the Civil War cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863.
Courtesy of Elizabeth L. Hill, Chief, Still Picture Branch, National Archives
T hese modern prints showing the crowd around the platform at Gettysburg and a detail from that picture of President Lincoln on the platform were made from the original glass plate negative at the National Archives. The plate lay unidentified in the Archives for some fifty-five years until in 1952, Josephine Cobb, Chief of the Still Pictures Branch, recognized Lincoln in the center of the detail, head bared and probably seated. To the immediate left (Lincoln's right) is Lincoln's bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, and to the far right (beyond the limits of the detail) is Governor Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania. Cobb estimated that the photograph was taken about noontime, just after Lincoln arrived at the site and before Edward Everett's arrival, and some three hours before Lincoln gave his now famous address.
The Gettysburg Address By President Abraham Lincoln
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has come to be recognized at home and abroad, not merely as a key document in American history, but as one of the gems of the English language. The reason lies as much, perhaps, in the unique and somewhat ambiguous character of the Battle of Gettysburg, as in the poetic imagery and rhythms of Lincoln's speech memorializing the battle and the battlefield. Although the American Civil War was won and lost more conclusively on other fields, the metaphor and symbol, which Emerson avowed to be the ultimate of all factual history, have come to rest not on Vicksburg or Pea Ridge, nor even on Appomattox, but on Gettysburg. Thus, the most futilely desperate of General Lee's maneuvers is forevermore, it would seem, to be envisioned as "the high tide of the Confederacy," and the resolute suffering and almost somnambulistic immobility of General Meade's army is likewise forevermore to be imagined as the unavoidable labor pains attendant upon the rebirth of democracy. The mixing of metaphors in our national imagination bothers few, if any, possibly because the original use of metaphor remains resolutely unschooled, but also perhaps because the human mind is, as Emerson insisted, unwilling to remain satisfied with events in and for themselves. Events must have meaning, even if the mind has to imagine what is not really apprehended. This is what Lincoln did when he wrote the Gettysburg Address, and what those who have come after him have accepted, not as the only word, nor surely as the last word, but certainly as the truly great word. |
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