By MARSHA
MERCER
Rarely has a
president been so wrong.
“The world will little note
nor long remember what we say here…” So Abraham Lincoln predicted in his brief,
eloquent speech at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg on Nov. 19,
1863.
The sesquicentennial of the Civil War mostly has commemorated bloody
battles. Now we turn to the powerful words that shaped our views.
At
Gettysburg National Battlefield Park, Dedication Day ceremonies are Nov. 19. A
series of lectures, book-signings and other events Nov. 16 to 23 will
commemorate the Gettysburg address.
The address is one of
the most noted and quoted speeches in history, but Lincoln
wasn’t the main speaker that day. The orator was Edward Everett, a former
senator and secretary of state who delivered a two-hour address. We laugh about
long-winded Everett, but, historian Garry Wills reminds us, in the 19th
century lengthy dramatic speeches were a kind of performance art.
Four
months earlier, on July 3, 1863, the Union had won the three-day Battle of
Gettysburg. More than 50,000 Confederate and Union troops were dead, captured, missing
or wounded. Bodies that had been hastily buried in makeshift graves on the
battlefield were still being interred in the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery.
Lincoln
had been invited to make “a few appropriate remarks.” His 272-word speech
changed forever the way Americans think about our country and the Civil War.
“Up to
the Civil War `the United States’ was invariably a plural noun: `The United
States are a free country.’ After Gettysburg it became a singular: `The United
States is a free country,’” writes Wills, author of the 1992 book “Lincoln at
Gettysburg.”
In his
remarks, Lincoln reached back to the Declaration of Independence to reframe the
war as a fight for liberty and freedom. The nation was “conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he said.
And, “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
did not mention the Emancipation Proclamation. In effect for less than a year, it
had freed many, but not all, slaves. The war would grind on for two more years,
but in two minutes, he assigned surviving Americans the task of renewing the
promise of freedom for all. His critics were livid. Some complained that the
president was deliberately misleading the public about American history. The country
was founded on the Constitution, which had avoided any mention of equality.
A Chicago
newspaper called the address “a perversion of history so flagrant that the most
extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful,” historian David
Herbert Donald writes in his 1995 book, “Lincoln.”
Donald
says Wilbur F. Storey also wrote that the soldiers who perished on the
battlefield died “to uphold the Constitution and the Union created by it,” not
to “dedicate the nation to `the proposition that all men are created equal.’”
It seems
odd in our word-flooded society that a few simple words could have such lasting
impact. Our politicians blab constantly, their every forgettable syllable and gesture
recorded, tweeted and analyzed.
In
contrast, there’s no definitive account of the Gettysburg ceremonies. We don’t know
when Lincoln wrote his remarks. Historian Wills dismisses as a silly myth the familiar
story that the president scribbled his remarks on scrap paper on the train from
Washington. At least five handwritten, slightly different copies survive.
The crowd
interrupted Lincoln multiple times with applause -- or not at all, depending on
who’s telling the story. The Associated Press
reporter who transcribed Lincoln’s speech inserted brackets five times to indicate
applause, but years later said he’d arbitrarily included the brackets and wasn’t
sure there had been any applause, says historian Glenn LaFantasie.
Some say Lincoln
thought the speech a failure. “That speech won’t scour!” he supposedly said
afterwards. “Scour” referred to plows used on the prairies that failed to turn over
the heavy soil, Donald explains. Wills says Lincoln was satisfied with the
speech.
One thing
is clear. When we read the address 150 years later, Lincoln’s ideas still speak
to us. It’s well worth remembering the power of words.
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