Off topic, but given the stirring events of this weekend and the approaching 162nd and 249th anniversaries of two and one, respectively, notable events in US history, I feel like sharing this excerpt from Volume 2 of Shelby Foote’s classic three-volume work on our nation’s great historical bad example.
“Our friends abroad see it,” he declared; “John Bright and his glorious band of European republicans see that we are fighting for Democracy, or (to get rid of the technical name) for liberal institutions.… My suggestion then is that you should seize an early opportunity, and any subsequent chance, to teach your great audience of plain people that the war is not North against South, but the People against the Aristocrats…”
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Lincoln filed the letter in his desk and in his mind, and seven weeks later, on November 2, acting on the suggestion that he “seize an early opportunity,” accepted an invitation to attend the dedication of a new cemetery at Gettysburg for the men who had fallen there in the July battle…
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News that the President would appear at Gettysburg reached the papers soon after his acceptance of the tardy invitation, and their reactions varied from bland to indignant, hostile editors protesting that a ceremony intended to honor fallen heroes was no proper occasion for what could only be a partisan appeal…
…Lincoln held to his intention to attend the ceremonies, despite the quips and adverse comments in and out of print. He was, he remarked in another connection this week, not much upset by anything said about him, especially in the papers. “These comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice, and have received a great deal of kindness not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.” Meanwhile, in the scant period between the tendering of the invitation and the date for his departure, there was not much time for composing his thoughts, let alone for setting them down on paper…
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[On the speakers’ platform that day] after the Baltimore Glee Club had sung an ode composed for the occasion, Lamon pronounced the words: “The President of the United States.” Lincoln rose, and as a photographer began setting up his tripod and camera in front of the rostrum, delivered—in what a reporter called “a sharp, unmusical treble voice,” but with what John Hay considered “more grace than is his wont”—the “few appropriate remarks” which the committee had said it desired of him “after the oration.”
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon 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 are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of 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.” A polite scattering of applause was overridden at this point as Lincoln continued. “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 that they have thus far so nobly carried on. 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
He finished before the crowd, a good part of whose attention had been fixed on the photographer anyhow, realized that he was fairly launched on what he had to say. In reaction to what a later observer described as the “almost shocking brevity” of the speech, especially by contrast with the one that went before, the applause was delayed, then scattered and barely polite. Moreover, the photographer missed his picture. Before he had time to adjust his tripod and uncap the lens, Lincoln had said “of the people, by the people, for the people” and sat down…
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… as he resumed his seat alongside his friend Lamon and heard the perfunctory spatter of applause whose brevity matched his own, the speaker himself was taken with a feeling of regret that he had not measured up to what had been expected of him. Recalling a word used on the prairie in reference to a plow that would not clean itself while shearing through wet soil, he said gloomily: “Lamon, that speech won’t scour. It is a flat failure and the people are disappointed.”
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… The final draft—only two words longer than the one he had part-read, part-improvised at the Gettysburg ceremony, though he had altered, to one degree or another, half of its ten sentences—would be memorized in the future by millions of American school children, including those of the South, despite his claim that a victory by their forebears, in their war for independence, would have meant the end of government by and for the people. That speech did indeed scour, even in dark and bloody ground.
As a kid, I learned that speech with the unspoken understanding that it honors ALL who fell there in those days leading up to July 4th even though no one, including the speaker, intended that at the time.
Time brings healing, and healthy “granulation tissue” was present in the American soul in 1863, for when Vicksburg capitulated on the Fourth, there was no jeering or other tension, as the generals had feared, when Union troops entered the town. As Mr. Foote describes it, bluecoats and graybacks stood around, talking and swapping tales.
Talk while standing on common ground is much better than storming out of the Union room, or shooting at each other.
No one ever wins a civil war, and the revolution that is America goes on and on — a burden as well as a great gift.
But the events this weekend emphasized that we are still Liberals, in the sense of not being monarchists, and that most of us have only limited patience with aristocrats — including members of the “aristocracy of the mind,” as Buster Kilrain so strangely put it in the movie Gettysburg — when they step outside their role as celebrities and try bossing us around.
God bless America.
Featured image: lisbyt, public domain. He’s hatless and blurry, in the middle of the shot. This, I’ve read, is the only extant photo of Lincoln giving a speech.
Flight To Wonder 