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 “Consecration 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
1.
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7.
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The Memoirs of Colonel John S. Mosby
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(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 189, 211, 217; Hsieh,
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8.
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73 (January 2009), 120–22, 126–27; Martin Oefele, “German-Americans and the War up to Gettysburg,” in David L. Valuska and Christian B. Keller, eds.,
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(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2004), 18, 20, 21, 25; Christian B. Keller,
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Death or Glory: The Legacy of the Crimean War
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 49, 87; C. V. Tevis and D. R. Marquis,
The History of the Fighting Fourteenth, Published in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the muster of the regiment into the United States service, May 23, 1861
(Brooklyn: Eagle Press, 1911), 213; Trevor Royle,
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(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 107; George Norton Galloway,
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9.
Scott, in Jason Mann Frawley, “Marching Through Pennsylvania: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During the Gettysburg Campaign,” Ph.D. dissertation, Texas Christian University (2008), 45; Spencer Glasgow Welch to Cordelia Strother Welch (August 18, 1862), in
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10.
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(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 27, 34, 35–36, 39, 105, 107, 108, 144–45, 202–3, 277–78; Edward Hagerman, “Field Transportation and Strategic Mobility in the Union Armies,”
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Morgan,
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(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 122; Andrew Elmer Ford,
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(Springfield, MA: 10th Regiment Veterans Assoc., 1909), 56–58; Theodore B. Gates, diary entry for January 9, 1863,
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John Hamilton SeCheverell,
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13.
“An English View of our Civil War,”
National Intelligencer
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Lieutenant General Jubal Anderson Early, C.S.A.: Autobiographical Sketch and Narrative of the War Between the States
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Gary W. Gallagher,
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