Lincoln (93 page)

In this period of relative quiet the President allowed his thoughts to turn to making another public statement—this time something less defensive than his extraordinarily successful letters to Corning, Birchard, Seymour, and Conkling, something that would explain to the American people the significance of the huge war into which they had stumbled. Lincoln had been brooding over this idea for some time. Shortly after the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg reached Washington, he responded to a group of serenaders by pointing out how appropriate it was that the Union victory occurred on the nation’s birthday. What better way was there to celebrate that day when—“How long ago is it?—eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” The root of the rebellion was “an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal,” and now it had suffered major defeats on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But the President’s thoughts were not yet sufficiently matured for full expression, and he concluded, “Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.”

During the following months the larger significance of the war was never far from Lincoln’s mind. The need for a broad statement on the subject began to seem more and more pressing as Northerners, convinced by the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg that the end of the war was in sight, began debating the terms on which the Southern states should be restored to the Union. Many urged the President to address the people directly on these issues, describing the significance of the conflict and explaining why the enormous sacrifices required by the war were worthwhile. Even before the news from Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Horace Greeley, impressed by Lincoln’s letter to the Albany Democrats, begged the President to write such a “greatly needed” letter “on
the causes of the War and the necessary conditions of Peace.”
From Boston, the wealthy merchant and railroad man John Murray Forbes suggested that the President should address “the public mind of the North and of such part of the South as you can reach” on the basic issue of the war, which he saw as not just a contest of “North against South but
the People against the Aristocrats.”
If Lincoln would seize every opportunity to hammer home the simple idea “that we are fighting for Democracy or (to get rid of the technical name) for liberal institutions,” Forbes predicted, “the Rebellion will be crushed.”

In November, after the elections, the opportunity came to do just what Forbes had urged. The President was invited to attend the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, where the thousands of men killed in that battle, imperfectly identified and hastily buried, were being reinterred. The orator for the occasion, Edward Everett, the former president of Harvard College, former United States senator, and former Secretary of State, could be counted on to give an extended speech. The President was asked, “as Chief Executive of the nation, formally [to] set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.” The invitation to the President was not an afterthought on the part of David Wills and the other members of the Gettysburg Cemetery Commission; to make sure that their letter would be favorably received, they doubtless preceded it by informal contacts through Ward Hill Lamon, who was known to be an intimate of the President, and they probably chose Lamon to be grand marshal of the procession at Gettysburg just for this reason.

Lincoln accepted, and during the following weeks he gave much thought to the brief remarks that he would make on November 19. He took the assignment very seriously and in the course of his preparation called to the White House William Saunders, the landscape architect in charge of planning the Gettysburg cemetery, in order to learn the topography of a place he had never visited but knew well from his commanders’ reports of the great battle. Using White House stationery, Lincoln began writing out an address expressing the ideas he had voiced in his brief response to the serenade after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. By this time the President had his facts straight. No longer did he refer to the Declaration of Independence as having been written “about eighty years ago”; now he wrote without hesitation,
“Four score and seven years ago.” For the most part, the writing went smoothly and without interruptions—a sure sign that he had carefully reflected on his words—but toward the end of the first page of the short address Lincoln faltered after writing “It is rather for us, the living, to stand here...,” crossed out the last three words, and substituted “we here be dedicated.” He had trouble with the ending, and shortly before he went to Gettysburg he told James Speed that he had found time to write only about half of his address.

But he had the rest of it in his mind before he left the White House on November 18 and needed only a few quiet minutes to write it all out. He chose his words deliberately, preferring, as he always did, short words to long, words of Anglo-Saxon origin to those of Latin derivation. From the first two rhyming words—“Four score”—the cadences were somberly musical, and his gravely repetitive phrases—“we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow”—had a solemnity worthy of the occasion. Antithesis was his basic rhetorical strategy, contrasting the living with the dead, “what we say here” with “what they [the soldiers] did here.” He did not strive for novelty in language but drew, consciously or unconsciously, on the stores of his memory. Many of his phrases had echoes of the King James version of the Bible. His closing promise of survival for “government of the people, by the people, for the people” may have had its origin in Daniel Webster’s 1830 speech calling the American government “made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people,” but more probably he derived it from a sermon of Theodore Parker, to which Herndon had called his attention, defining democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.” Lincoln had made earlier use of the idea in his July 1861 message to Congress when he referred to the United States as “a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people.”

Moving from past to present to future, Lincoln’s address assumed an hourglass form: an opening account of the events of the past that had led up to the battle of Gettysburg; three brief sentences on the present occasion; and a final, more expansive view of the nation’s future. His tone was deliberately abstract; he made no specific reference to either the battle of Gettysburg or of the cemetery that he was dedicating, he did not mention the South or the Confederacy, and he did not speak of the Army of the Potomac or of its commanders. He was deliberately moving away from the particular occasion to make a general argument.

Lincoln read his draft to no one before he reached Gettysburg, and he explained to no one why he had accepted the invitation to attend the dedication ceremonies or what he hoped to accomplish in his address. Yet his text suggested his purpose. When he drafted his Gettysburg speech, he did not know for certain what Edward Everett would say, but he could safely predict that this conservative former Whig would stress the ties of common origin, language, belief, and law shared by Southerners and Northerners and appeal
for a speedy restoration of the Union under the Constitution. Everett’s oration could give another push to the movement for a negotiated peace and strengthen the conservative call for a return to “the Union as it was,” with all the constitutional guarantees of state sovereignty, state rights, and even state control over domestic institutions, such as slavery.

Lincoln thought it important to anticipate this appeal by building on and extending the argument he had advanced in his letter to Conkling against the possibility of a negotiated peace with the Confederates. In the Gettysburg address he drove home his belief that the United States was not just a political union, but a nation—a word he used five times. Its origins antedated the 1789 Constitution, with its restrictions on the powers of the national government; it stemmed from 1776. It was with the Declaration of Independence that “our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This was, of course, not a new idea for Lincoln; his first inaugural address carefully developed the thesis that the Union was older than the Constitution. Nor was it an original contribution to American political discourse. It had been an essential part of the ideology of the Whig party, which had been elaborated by Daniel Webster; indeed, almost any advocate of a broad construction of the powers of the federal government was forced to appeal from the constraints of the Constitution to the liberties of the Declaration.

In invoking the Declaration now, Lincoln was reminding his listeners—and, beyond them, the thousands who would read his words—that theirs was a nation pledged not merely to constitutional liberty but to human equality. He did not have to mention slavery in his brief address to make the point that the Confederacy did not share these values. Instead, in language that evoked images of generation and birth—using what the Democratic
New York World
caustically called “obstetric analogies”—he stressed the role of the Declaration in the origins of the nation, which had been “conceived in Liberty” and “brought forth” by the attending Founding Fathers. Now the sacrifices of “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here” on the battlefield at Gettysburg had renewed the power of the Declaration. “The last full measure of devotion” which they gave made it possible to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain” and to pledge “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

Compressed into 272 words, Lincoln’s message was at once a defense of his administration, an explanation why the war with its attendant horrors had to continue, and a pledge that because of these exertions “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

For all Lincoln’s careful preparation, it seemed for a while that he might not be able to attend the dedication ceremonies. On the day he was scheduled to go to Gettysburg, Tad was ill, too sick to eat his breakfast, and Mary Lincoln, recalling the deaths of her other boys, became hysterical at the thought that her husband would leave her at such a critical time. But so
important was the occasion and so weighty was the message he intended to deliver that he brushed aside his wife’s pleas and about noon left Washington on a special train of four cars. All the members of the cabinet had been invited to attend the ceremonies, but only Seward, Blair, and Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher were able to accompany the President. The presence of only the more conservative members of the administration in the President’s entourage caused derisive comment in Washington, where United States Treasurer Francis E. Spinner guffawed,
“Let the dead bury the dead.”
The party also included Nicolay and Hay, the President’s secretaries; William Johnson, Lincoln’s black manservant; Benjamin B. French, who had written a hymn to be performed at the ceremonies; the ubiquitous Lamon; members of the diplomatic corps; and some foreign visitors, along with the Marine Band and a military escort from the Invalid Corps. The President was in good spirits, laughing and joking with his companions on the train. At one stop a beautiful little girl lifted a bouquet of rosebuds to the open window in the President’s car, saying with her childish lisp, “Flowrth for the President!” Stepping to the window, Lincoln bent down and kissed the child, saying: “You’re a sweet little rose-bud yourself. I hope your life will open into perpetual beauty and goodness.”

Arriving about five o’clock at Gettysburg, where David Wills and Edward Everett met his train, Lincoln was relieved to receive a telegram from Stanton: “Mrs. Lincoln informed me that your son is better this evening.” After dinner at Wills’s impressive mansion, Lincoln was called out to respond to a serenade by the Fifth New York Artillery Band. Never happy at extemporaneous speaking, the President apologized that he had “several substantial reasons” for not making a speech, the chief of which was that he had no speech to make. “In my position,” he observed, “it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things.” A voice from the crowd said, “If you can help it.” “It very often happens,” Lincoln responded, “that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all.”

Disappointed at hearing only what the Dutch ambassador scornfully called one of Lincoln’s “pasquinades,” the crowd moved on to serenade Seward, who gave them the kind of speech they wanted, praising the United States as “the richest, the broadest, the most beautiful, the most magnificent, and capable of a great destiny, that has ever been given to any part of the human race.” But Seward’s tone of reconciliation with the rebellious Southerners as friends and brothers and his insistence that the sole objective of the war was to establish “the principle of democratic government” were not exactly in tune with the message that the President proposed to deliver the next day. Perhaps partly for this reason Lincoln, after working for a while in his room at Wills’s house to prepare a clean copy of his remarks, took it over to Seward’s room, where he presumably read it to the Secretary.

On the morning of the nineteenth Lincoln, after giving the final touches to his address, made a clear copy and appeared at the door of the Wills house at about ten o’clock, dressed in a new black suit, with which the white
gauntlets he was wearing sharply contrasted. His stovepipe hat bore a black band, to indicate that he was still mourning the death of his son Willie. After he mounted his horse, which some observers thought too small for so tall a man, there was a considerable delay before the procession got under way, and the President spent the time shaking hands with the well-wishers who crowded about him. Finally the procession began, with four military bands providing music, and the President, along with his three cabinet officers, representatives of the military, and members of the Cemetery Commission representing the various states, made a slow march of about three-quarters of a mile to the burial ground. Recognizing the solemnity of the occasion, the President appeared somber and absorbed in thought.