He was not prepared to speak on the “glorious theme,” but in fact he had been preparing for such a speech all of his adult life. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he said in 1861. Those sentiments sprang from one single, animating idea: that the most ordinary of people had been created with the same set of natural rights as the most extraordinary, that no one was born either with crowns upon their heads or saddles upon their backs. “Most governments,” he wrote in a brief sketch in 1854, “have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men.” The founders of the American republic had taken a different route; they made what he called “an experiment,” to see whether in fact democratic self-government was really a possibility.
More than they had any reason to expect, this “undecided experiment” had now emerged as a “successful one.” Of course, that depended on how one defined success. The cynical and the self-interested sneered that this success was only temporary, only waiting for the first real test, at which point all of those ordinary people with their equal say in government would begin quarreling obscenely with one another, and on the basis of possessing their precious rights would stalk out of the chambers of government and proceed to do whatever they wanted. “When you have governed men for several years,” Otto von Bismarck declared, “you will become a Monarchist. Believe me, one cannot lead or bring to prosperity a great nation without the principle of authority—that is, the Monarchy.” Let an issue arise which posed real challenges, and the “experiment” would be revealed as a fraud.
Precisely such an issue was buried deep in the foundations of the American republic itself. The founders of the republic tolerated the existence of chattel slavery in the new “experiment,” despite its obvious contradiction of the principle that everyone was, by natural right, authorized to govern themselves. The founders also expected that this was a problem already dying of its own failures, a disease which could be left to cure itself. But it did not. Instead, it grew and prospered, and in time it brought into question the integrity of the whole “experiment” in popular government, because if one entire segment of the people were to be excluded from pursuing their own self-government, then why wasn’t this proof of Bismarck’s dictum, that government from the top down was the natural order of things? By the 1850s, the tall man was asking himself and others whether the resurgent economic power of slavery was threatening the very premises upon which the American democracy was built. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it—where will it stop?”3
His election as president was a sign to the nation that a stop had indeed been called to the metastasization of slavery. But now came the moment when the evil eye of the aristocrats began to gleam, since the people of the slaveholding states proclaimed a predictably democratic unwillingness to be disagreed with, and used that unwillingness to pull down the entire house. The tall man had insisted over and over again that Southern secession was not really a free exercise of equal rights to do as democratic equals pleased, but a refusal to abide by the rules of democracy and an aboveboard national election. It was not rights or liberty the Southern Confederacy was asserting, but anarchy, and anarchy could lead nowhere but into the hands of the despots, who would promise the restoration of order.
The tall man had once hoped that the secession problem could be resolved without dealing too harshly with the seceders, that appeals to “the mystic chords of memory” would draw them back. But appeals to the bonds of fraternity were met with defiance and civil war, and this man who once confessed that he could barely bring himself to pull a trigger on wild game now found himself directing armies numbering nearly two million men. And far from the people of the democracy rallying to the cause in noble ranks and undivided loyalty, there had been lethal levels of dissension over how the war should be conducted and whether the aims of the war should include the destruction of slavery as the original burr under the saddle. His energy sapped, he wrestled with the daily dreariness of the war’s news, and even though he was not an explicitly religious men, he increasingly was tempted to wonder if “God was against us in our view of the subject of slavery in this country, and our method of dealing with it.”4
And then came Gettysburg. It was not merely that Gettysburg finally delivered a victory, or that it administered a bloody reverse to Southern fortunes at the point and in the place where they might otherwise have scored their greatest triumph, or that it had come at such a stupendous cost in lives. It was that the monumental scale of that bloodletting was its own refutation to the old lie, that a democracy enervates the virtue of its people to the point where they are unwilling to do more than blinkingly look to their personal self-interest. That the news of Gettysburg came in conjunction with the fall of Vicksburg, and came together on the anniversary of the Declaration he held so dear, seemed like a sign written in the clouds, and that was the first meaning he attached to Gettysburg in his impromptu speech on the night of July 7th. But the idea continued to mature. By September, he had become convinced that Gettysburg had not only made “peace … not appear so distant as it did,” but that it would demonstrate that “there can be no successful appeal from a fair election, but to the next election.” The new national cemetery added the final stone in the arch of his thinking, because the cemetery was the city of the battle’s dead, and the size of that city was its own mute testimony that the citizens of a democracy were not merely a population of bovine shopkeepers and blank-stare farmers, but citizens who had seen something transcendental after all in the rainbow promise of democracy, something worth dying to protect, something worth communicating to the living.5
As was his wont, the tall man began committing his ideas to paper piecemeal, telling the journalist Noah Brooks on November 15th that the “remarks” he would deliver at the cemetery’s dedication were “written, but not finished,” and his soon-to-be attorney general James Speed, that it was “nearly done.”6 He left Washington just after noon on Wednesday, the 18th of November, accompanied by three of his cabinet secretaries (William Seward, John P. Usher, and Montgomery Blair), plus his two White House staffers, John Nicolay and John Hay, the Marine Band, and assorted generals, admirals, and the French and Italian ministers, Henri Mercier and Joseph Bertinetti, and their military attachés, all accommodated in three passenger cars and a baggage car. In Baltimore (where two years before he had been threatened with assassination), he came out onto “the platform of the car” to acknowledge the cheering crowds who surrounded him. He arrived in Gettysburg “about sundown” to be greeted by the local eminentos, including David Wills and the college president, Henry Baugher. The others would be put up at Gettysburg’s brimming hotels; Wills claimed the right to play host to the president.7
Thursday the 19th dawned as a “beautiful Indian summer day,” bright but hazy, the air filled with a kind of golden smoke. The tall man was still dickering with the wording of his “remarks,” rewriting sentences, crossing out words, careting in new ones. The parade to the cemetery began forming up in the town diamond at nine o’clock, with “officers and soldiers of the Army of the Potomac” in the van, followed by the tall man, “mounted upon a young and beautiful chestnut bay horse” and dressed in “a black frock coat … his towering figure surmounted by a high silk hat.” It took them an hour to get organized, and another hour to traverse the closely packed, cheering length of Baltimore Street and move up the slope of Cemetery Hill to the new cemetery’s entrance, while artillery salutes were fired every minute. “The crowd was so dense that the air was rendered so close even on that day in the late fall that more than one lady and even men fainted.”
The program began as Birgfield’s Band, which had been brought in from Philadelphia, struck up a special commission by their director, Adolph Birgfield, his “Homage d’un Heros”; the chaplain of the House of Representatives, Thomas Stockton, f
ollowed with a prayer, and the Marine Band (under the baton of its enterprising director, Francis Scala) played a dolorous version of the Doxology—Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Finally it was the turn of the orator Edward Everett: Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields … The tall man had once appraised Everett as one of the most overrated public speakers in America, and he could be forgiven if his mind wandered at points during the 13,000 words which poured forth from Everett in one Latinate period after another.8
He told Noah Brooks that he would keep his own remarks “short, short, short,” planning to say much the same thing as he had said in July. He did not propose to trespass on Everett’s territory; he would leave to the eloquent New Englander the review of the war and the battle and the question of how much the battle had cost and its significance in the overall course of things. Instead, he would look for the meaning of this battle and its dead in the larger historical scheme of the American “experiment.” What would be military history in Everett’s hands would become metaphor and symbol in his. He would begin (as he had back in July) by connecting the battle with the republic’s founding, although now he would drop the preoccupation with one Independence Day leading to a second one. He would also drop the pedestrian opening he employed in July—How long ago is it?—eighty odd years?—and replace it with a poetic flourish reminiscent of the Psalmist’s calculation of the life span of humanity: Four-score and seven years ago … Mary Todd Lincoln remembered in 1866 that her husband “felt religious More than Ever about the time he went to Gettysburg,” and it showed in his “remarks.” (It was also an echo of an earlier Independence Day speech, by Galusha Grow, after Grow had been elected Speaker of the House in the special session of Congress called for July 4, 1861: “Fourscore years ago, fifty-six bold merchants, farmers, lawyers, and mechanics, the representatives of a few feeble colonists, scattered along the Atlantic sea-board, met in convention to found a new empire, based on the inalienable rights of man.” Grow’s speech had been widely reprinted, from Frank Moore’s Rebellion Record to Beadle’s Dime Patriotic Speaker, and Lincoln had few scruples about adopting and bettering other people’s locutions.) From there, biblical images would abound: … our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation (as though it was the Mother of God bringing forth her firstborn and wrapping him in swaddling clothes) conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”9
It was a matter of ridicule in the eyes of both the kings and the commoners alike that a nation could be dedicated to anything as rationalistic as a proposition, fully as much as it had seemed ridiculous ages before that a heavenly King could be born in a stable. Nations, they scoffed, are not dedicated; they simply are. And propositions are not the building stuff of a people’s identity; nations are made by time, by collective memory, by racial and religious solidarity, by histories of loyalty and submission to a select race of leaders, warriors, and rulers. Propositions are fit for debates, disputations, and tutorials, but not for nation building. But this was just what the American founders had done. It might take twelve centuries to make a Frenchman, but it would take only twenty minutes of reasoning to make an American.10
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. And not merely a war, but a testing, a kind of pass/fail examination to determine once and for all whether the American founding had indeed been misbegotten—whether a democracy built solely out of the fragile reeds of constitutional propositions was merely a fuzzy pipe dream or whether people really could survive without crowns and saddles—whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. Gettysburg proved that democracy had not in fact enervated and debased the American people, but had instead made them stronger and more determined to resist any backsliding from the integrity of the proposition to which they had been dedicated in 1776.
The tall man did not speak of the war as a crusade of liberation from slavery, which doubtless surprised people then and surprises people now. But the destruction of slavery was actually a subset of the larger contest over democracy. If democracy failed, and the South triumphed, there would be no point in talking about emancipation; if democracy did survive and the republic was reunited, then slavery was doomed just by the fact of that successful reuniting. Emancipation, however great a righting of a historic wrong, would be meaningless unless it was set within the larger question of democracy’s survival. “The central idea pervading this struggle,” he told his secretary John Hay back at the beginning of the war, “is the necessity … of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,” for “if we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”11
We are met on a great battle field of that war, which is a reminder that those very ordinary people whom the cultured despisers of democracy hold in such contempt have been willing to mount some very extraordinary efforts to preserve it. Especially, we have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. Live, and be reminded that those who died here did so because they saw in democracy something more than opportunities for self-interest and self-aggrandizement, something that spoke to the fundamental nature of human beings itself, something which arched like a comet in the political sky. This we may, in all propriety do. (This was clumsy; he dropped it and replaced it with It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this …)
On this hinge, he turned from what had been done to what was being done, and what yet remained to do. 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 hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. For all the planning, foresight, and expenditure which had gone into the creation of the Gettysburg cemetery, the real focus of attention would always be, and deserved to be, on the soldiers who had fought and won the greatest battle, not so much of a war, but of the age-old struggle of commoners and kings. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.
Any dedication to be done that day would have to be performed in the hearts of the people standing all around, by the 15,000 spectators who crammed into Gettysburg for the ceremonies, by the dignitaries and generals and politicians who would sit stiffly on the twelve-by-twenty-foot platform William Saunders had erected on the cemetery grounds, dedicating themselves in a peculiar form of baptism to the true loftiness of the democratic faith. 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. Because dedication is not only an end, as it was for the soldiers who died at Gettysburg; it is also a beginning, the first step in pouring new wine into the old wineskins, of extolling the virtues of democracy and preaching its worth as the one true and natural system of human society. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, the great task of winning the war (that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion), but also the task of reaffirming and reappropriating the spirit of the founders.
If he was wrong about democracy, if the war went on in the resultless way the half heart generals had managed things, if the people took counsel of their weariness and grief and installed someone like McClellan in the presidency who would negotiate everything away—if these dead had died in vain—then he and every other American were surely of all men most miserable. What Gettysburg must become, then, was the occasion of something which bordered on a national revival, a new birth of freedom (and though he had not planned to do so, he would reinforce this point by inserting under God to reinforce the tent-meeting urgency of that renewal)—so that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. …
Everett was almost finished: … in the glorious annals of our common country there will be no brighter page than that which relates the battles of Gettysburg. There was then a “Consecratio
n Hymn” to be sung by the National Union Musical Association, five stanzas’ worth of “holy ground” and “widow’s tears.” Ward Hill Lamon was ready to make the next introduction, and as he did, the tall man leaned over and thanked Everett.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States,” announced Lamon. In the distance, South Mountain slumbered in a soft blue haze. The platform faced westward, and from there, the cupola of the college, where Lee stood on the morning of Pickett’s Charge, and the smaller cupola of the Lutheran seminary which John Buford used to direct his early morning stand on July 1st, were plainly visible. The tall man stood up, unfolded his wire-rim spectacles, produced two or three sheets of paper from his inside pocket, and grasped, as was his habit, his left coat lapel.
He spoke slowly, and with that penetrating clarity which made him heard even at the far edges of the crowd. Altogether, he delivered his dedication address “in a firm free way, with more grace than is his wont,” wrote John Hay in his diary, and in little more than two and a half minutes.
Then he was done. A photographer on an elevated platform at the edge of the crowd cursed the brevity of the tall man’s speech because he could not get his sticky, wet glass plate ready in time to capture an image. There was a patter of applause from the crowd, unsure whether this was the end or merely the introduction to something longer, although it quickly swelled to full volume once it was clear that the tall man was indeed finished. “And the music wailed and we went home through crowded and cheering streets.” And, added Hay, “all the particulars are in the daily papers.”
The last invasion was finally over.12
Notes
PROLOGUE
1. Andrew Brown, Geology and the Gettysburg Campaign (1962; Harrisburg: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 2006), 8–10; Stephanie J. Perles et al., Vegetation Classification and Mapping at Gettysburg National Military Park and Eisenhower National Historic Site (Philadelphia: National Park Service Northeast Region, 2006), 5–7; James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s County: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 89–91, 108–9; Garry E. Adelman and Timothy H. Smith, Devil’s Den: A History and Guide (Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1997), 1–3; “First Settlers on the Manor of Maske,” Historical Register: Notes and Queries, Biographical and Genealogical Relating to Interior Pennsylvania for the Year 1884, ed. William Henry Egle (Harrisburg: Lane S. Hart, 1884), 2:153–55; “An Act to release all claims, on the part of the Commonwealth, to certain lands within the Manor, or reputed Manor, of Maske,” in Laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: J. Bioren, 1803), 5:229–30.
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