A Celebrated Spot for the Pilgrim: Lincoln and the Fields of Gettysburg
Written November 2014
(This is not the entire piece. This is a brief excerpt of a larger work that will hopefully be published in print form sometime in 2016.)
For more than a century and a half, contemporaries of President Abraham Lincoln and now, historians studying him, have repeatedly attempted to tell the story of how the speech now known as the Gettysburg Address came to be. Today, it is one of the English language’s most celebrated orations because through it, Lincoln managed to assemble a beautiful concoction of poetic prose, religious imagery, and a divine sense of emotional realism to describe a nation’s purpose and its unconquered mission in the midst of its most terrible armed conflict. Some even say that it sparked an “intellectual revolution.”[i]
While interpretations have been disassembled and reassembled time and again in the 150-plus years since “the tall man” who “spoke slowly, and with…penetrating clarity”[ii] delivered his now-immortal oration, one thing has remained clear: the address came from Lincoln’s heart, Lincoln’s experiences, and Lincoln’s gifted, lyrical mind, so much so that the speech has remained a staple of American literary tradition, and of the American way of life. It is the quintessential American creed, a “Gospel” that “was born” in the midst of civil war, a fitting tribute full of “gushing gratitude toward the brave fallen of the rank and file.”[iii]
The Gettysburg Address is perhaps the most revered speech from one of America’s most revered writers. Lincoln is universally lauded as the archetypal poet-president, with speeches and letters that have brought people all over the world to action, and to tears, for centuries. His words have been the rallying cries for patriots, civil rights activists, and Americans of all backgrounds everywhere. His image is inarguably the most recognizable amongst historical figures of the United States. “Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world,” Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1908. He was “so great that he overshadows all other national heroes,” with “supremacy” that “expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.”[iv]
Lincoln’s speech at the dedication of Soldiers’ National Cemetery on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, was his first major public oration in nearly two-and-a-half years; in fact, he had not appeared in front of a crowd that size—by most accounts, somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 onlookers—since his inauguration on March 4, 1861. In his inaugural address—delivered a month before the South fired on Fort Sumter, which started the Civil War—Lincoln called on Northerners and Southerners to consider the costs of “the momentous issue of civil war,” and proclaimed, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Lincoln, in a final attempt at avoiding “destruction of the Union,” told the nation that “passion may have strained,” but “it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union.” In closing, Lincoln presented his wish that “my dissatisfied fellow countrymen” would be “touched…by the better angels of our nature.”[v]
When he was asked by those organizing the dedicatory events at Gettysburg to deliver his now-famous “few appropriate remarks”—primarily Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin and Gettysburg attorney David Wills—Lincoln was initially hesitant. He would not be the main speaker; that honor belonged to Edward Everett, the president of Harvard and America’s most-gifted orator. Lincoln, of course, eventually accepted the offer, and got to work on “a speech ‘worthy of the occasion,’” which “he had been preparing for…all of his adult life,”[vi] due to his disposition that “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence” and Thomas Jefferson’s timeless proclamation that “all men are created equal.”[vii]
Soon after Lincoln initially delivered the address, a legend arose suggesting Lincoln had hurriedly written the speech as an afterthought on his way to the ceremony, during a train ride not 24 hours prior to the dedication of the new National Cemetery near the small Pennsylvania town that had seen 51,000 men fall victim to battlefield wounds, enemy capture, and outright death over the course of three days in July 1863. This tale was precipitated by men like Ward Hill Lamon, a “particular friend” who Lincoln had befriended in 1847 or 1848, and who worked with Lincoln as an “occasional law partner, political associate, government appointee, unofficial advisor, occasional emissary, personal bodyguard, boon companion, and eventually, biographer.” He was, in fact, author of “the only reminiscences recorded by a friend who knew Lincoln in both his Illinois and Washington years, as…an attorney, a candidate, and as President of the United States.”[viii]
In his memoirs, originally published in 1895, Lamon authored a chapter called “The True History of the Gettysburg Address,” in which he asserted, “A day or two before the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Mr. Lincoln told me…that he was extremely busy, and had no time” to prepare a speech. “From his hat,” continued Lamon, “he drew a sheet of foolscap, one side of which was closely written with what he informed me was a memorandum of his intended address. This he read to me...It proved to be in substance…what was afterwards printed as his famous Gettysburg speech.” After Lincoln delivered the address on November 19, Lamon lamented that Lincoln believed “that speech won’t scour! It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed,” an anecdotal piece that has not held up against the facts.[ix] “No one will ever settle the debate over whether Lincoln’s most famous speech was rhapsodically or indifferently received,” writes Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, though a young reporter from Harrisburg, Joseph Ignatius Gilbert, who received “the president’s handwritten manuscript to check it against his shorthand transcription” admitted that he saw confidence when the president “glanced up from his manuscript with a faraway look in his eyes as if appealing from the few thousands below him to the countless millions whom his words were to reach.”[x]
Many historians have concluded that Lamon’s assertion that (a) Lincoln had written his address quickly and (b) that initially he did not think it was effective, though it became legendary, are representative of Lamon’s bias—that he wanted to manufacture a mentality in which Lincoln was almost superhuman in his ability to write legendary speeches at a moment’s notice.
In reality, through the half-dozen or so modern full-length studies on the Gettysburg Address, historians agree that Lincoln spent a great deal of time deliberating over exactly which elements, themes, and individual words and clauses he would include in the dedicatory oration. Drawing on classical techniques of the Greek revival period, statements of equality in the Declaration of Independence, Judeo-Christian notions, and several other forms of oratory and literary styles, Lincoln collected ideas and molded them into the phrases now so famous amongst anyone with an ounce of familiarity with Lincoln the writer. As noted earlier, it was a speech that he was, in many ways, born to write, though the people of his time—and likely Lincoln himself—did not realize it would take hold of the human imagination as it has since that November day.
Lincoln had likely been considering what he would say since the days after the battle at Gettysburg had concluded. In July, on the lawn of the Executive Mansion, Lincoln had said, “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 own representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’”[xi] Lincoln eventually molded this into a more biblical, poetic clause: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In this fashion, he constructed the bulk of his address, as he had done with a substantive piece of his professional and personal writings, letters, and speeches—a scrap of paper here, a clause there, a quote here, an idea there.
Regardless of his apparent determination to conjure up “a few appropriate remarks” in honor of “soldiers…killed at the Battle of Gettysburg”[xii] in the weeks before the ceremony, it appears he did not spend “every passing hour…meditating on his short speech,”[xiii] though it was “likely very much on the president’s mind.” On November 8, while posing “for a new suite of portraits” at Alexander’s Gardner’s gallery in Washington, Sacramento Bee correspondent Noah Brooks asked Lincoln if “the president [had] written his own speech yet,” to which Lincoln responded that he had, but that he had “not yet finished” the draft, which was “short, short, short.”[xiv] Over the next ten days, prior to leaving Washington for Gettysburg on November 18, Lincoln worked from time to time on the speech, polishing particular elements, and adding or detracting others. But it was not until the night before—and even more so, the morning of—the dedication ceremony that Lincoln wrote everything he had to write, so that he could say everything that he felt needed to be said.
When he arrived at the train station in Gettysburg, just north of the town’s central Diamond (modern Lincoln Square) there was great adulation and pomp throughout the streets of this small, carriage-manufacturing, shoe-cobbling, agricultural community which had not quite been itself since June 30 of that year. One resident wrote, “Our old town is roused up to action,” as people were “whopping, singing, carrying on”[xv] and “celebrants were growing tipsier and louder by the minute.”[xvi] It was a far cry from the downtrodden vibe that had swept over the town since July 1, 2, and 3, 1863, when the bloodiest battle of the war had “completely broken up” any sense of “tranquility of the little town.”[xvii] The battle had left at least 7,000 dead humans, 3,000 dead horses, and 20,000 wounded soldiers behind, with dozens of field hospitals occupying farmhouses, barns, schools, churches, and the two institutions of higher education in the town—Pennsylvania (now Gettysburg) College and the Lutheran Theological Seminary.
“The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable—corpses swollen to twice their original size, some of them actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gasses and vapors,” wrote one Union officer on a burial crew soon after the battle’s conclusion. “The odors were nauseating, and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.”[xviii] “Hands and skulls no longer protruded from the soil,” but “the rubble of war seemed everywhere”[xix] upon Lincoln’s arrival, though the positive nighttime atmosphere on November 18 made the situation appear otherwise.
After delivering what his private secretary John Hay described as “half a dozen words meaning nothing,”[xx] Lincoln retired to his room on the second floor of the Wills house, though “No one knows whether Lincoln went to bed that night. The unrelenting noise from drunken revelers thronging the streets must have made it difficult, even impossible, to sleep.”[xxi] At some point that evening, Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, who was staying next door at the Harper House, “almost certainly discussed…visiting the battlefield in the morning before the procession to the cemetery.” Specifically, Lincoln wanted to see what Seward described to a reporter as “the ground around the Seminary.”[xxii]
About one mile west, on the other side of town from where Lincoln resided for the night, sat—and still sits—the five-story brick edifice of the main building at the Lutheran Theological Seminary.[xxiii] Having been initially completed in 1832, the structure served several functions for 31 years prior to the battle, including those of dormitories, classrooms, a library, chapel, professors’ offices, and a dining facility. Due to its physical size, voluminous capacity, and proximity to the initial fighting on July 1, 1863—it sat just a few hundred yards east of McPherson’s Ridge, where the bulk of the morning action took place—the Seminary building became a natural location for one of Gettysburg’s largest and longest-serving field hospitals. Between 600 and 700 soldiers from both sides (though mostly Union) filled its halls and surrounding fields for two-and-a-half months, until Lieutenant Colonel George F. McFarland of the 151st Pennsylvania left on September 16, 1863.[xxiv]
On the night of November 18, the Seminary functioned as a hotel, since “Every available room in the town was utilized,” leaving those in charge of “fraternal organizations, churches, and the colleges that had served as hospitals” no choice but for their sizable structures’ doors to be “thrown open so that all might have shelter.”[xxv] One such guest was a reporter from the Cincinnati Daily Commercial who wrote that he “was fortunate in securing quarters at the Theological Seminary,” and recognized the building’s purpose as a “witness to as much misery, heroic endurance, and patient resignation, as any building ever erected by man.” He also saw “where a shell from our batteries passed through the wall to several rooms, and finally rested on a closet shelf—the door where a brutal Confederate Colonel shot down a Union soldier, who was bearing in a bleeding and dying comrade.”[xxvi]
The fact that the reporter—and presumably many other visitors—were welcome guests at the Seminary building that evening is an intriguing development, based on the fact that the Seminary Board of Directors was adamantly opposed to the Union army’s occupation of the structure while it served as a hospital. The Seminary’s founder and president, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Simon Schmucker, wrote in mid-July 1863, “I recommend that a communication be addressed to the supreme medical authority at Washington urging the reasons why the interests of the Seminary should not be unnecessarily sacrificed to the convenience of these medical officials.”[xxvii] On August 11, the board—which “assembled at the appointed hour in Dr. Schmucker’s study,” seconded Schmucker’s motion when it resolved that a committee “be appointed to proceed to Washington, if necessary, & urge upon the Medical Authorities there, the desireableness & importance of vacating the building as soon as possible,” so that “the work of all necessary repairs” to the structure could begin “as soon as the Government shall have vacated the building from its present use as a general hospital.” The Seminary wanted to resume its preparations for the fall semester, and in order to “apply to the proper authorities in such cases provided, for the purpose of settling the damages sustained by the Seminary Edifice whilst used by the Government as a general hospital,” officials needed the building to be completely empty.[xxviii]
Despite their obvious displeasure over the hospital’s longstanding tenure, however, Schmucker and other Seminary faculty—as well as several Seminary students—appear to have been polite to the patients during their stay. Dr. Charles Krauth, a professor at the institution, told McFarland that “he could stay in the building as long as he pleased,” and several days later McFarland wrote, “Dr. Schmucker, Pres. of the Seminary has been to see me twice. He is very pleasant and said if I remained 2 or even 3 more weeks it would make no difference—he would teach me Theology.”[xxix] Obviously, there were some discrepancies in the faculty members’ public rhetoric versus their treatment of the wounded soldiers, who had no choice but to stay due to their unfortunate and miserable circumstances. McFarland, for instance, had a leg amputated on July 2, and was in such a deprived state that his family was allowed to stay with him for several weeks before his departure.
The Seminary’s apparent open-door policy during the night of November 18 exhibits a change of heart, though it still presents an ambiguous situation. The board did not mention the building’s use as a hotel in any meeting minutes after the occasion. Five decades later, in a similar situation, as Civil War veterans across the nation prepared for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the board resolved that it “does not regard…use [of] the Seminary buildings during the celebration of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913” as a “feasible…use of the Seminary Buildings”[xxx] based on a doctrine signed in 1903 that the Seminary did “not want any involvement” with being used “for secular purposes” such as those “related to the encampments…held in honor of the Civil War battle.”[xxxi]
On May 8, 1913, however, the board rescinded its previous “action…taken on May 16 1912 delaying the use of the buildings by visitors to the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Battle,” and decided to open its doors in exchange for “fair compensation” from “the government team” who “desires the use of our buildings for distinguished guests.” The “government team” that came from June 28 to July 7, 1913, was known as the Pennsylvania Commission, and contained a reported 527 guests. The Seminary’s wish was granted, too, as it received $2,938.70, according to the May 21, 1914, board minutes, “of which about one half was profit through careful and unpaid management and this profit has been invested in permanent improvements.”[xxxii]
In November 1863, it appears that the Seminary had not yet instituted any sort of ban on using the building for secular purposes, at least for the occasion pertaining to Lincoln being in town. The aforementioned reporter from Cincinnati interviewed Emmanuel Ziegler, “an intelligent and patriotic man”[xxxiii] who served as the steward of the Seminary, and whose wife, Mary, and their five children lived in the ground floor of the Seminary building at the time of the battle.[xxxiv]
The reporter noted that “a thousand tales of war and its incidents, which history will not record, but which tradition may perceive, cluster around this building, and for all time to come will make it a celebrated spot for the pilgrim to the battle ground.”[xxxv] Little did he know that the next morning the sixteenth President of the United States would become one of those pilgrims....
To read this piece in its entirety, stay tuned for publication information. The full publication will likely be coming sometime in 2016. I apologize for the wait and continued delays to this point. My research and writing is an ongoing process, and the general purpose and direction of this project has taken on a new, expansive, and more fulfilling and meaningful objective.
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Notes
[i] Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, p. 40.
[ii] Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg, p. 482.
[iii] Gabor Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, p. 129.
[iv] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals, p. 748.
[v] Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address” in Abraham Lincoln Selected Writings, pp. 619, 624.
[vi] Ibid. “Speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” pp. 613-614.
[vii] Guelzo, p. 476.
[viii] Harold Holzer, “Foreword” in Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847-1865, pp. vii-viii.
[ix] Lamon, p. 184.
[x] Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, p. 453.
[xi] Lincoln, “Response to a Serenade,” July 7, 1863 in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. VI, p. 319.
[xii] David Wills to Lincoln. Letter. November 2, 1863, in Robert Fortenbaugh, Lincoln and Gettysburg, p. 36.
[xiii] Louis A. Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Declaration, p. 71.
[xiv] Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, pp. 449-450. The quote regarding the length of the draft at that time may be found in nearly all popular modern published works on the Gettysburg Address.
[xv] Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, pp. 69, 75.
[xvi] Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, p. 451.
[xvii] Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, p. 73.
[xviii] Gregory A. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land, p. 73.
[xix] Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, p. 91.
[xx] John Hay. Diary. November 20, 1863, in Tyler Dennett, ed. Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay, p. 120.
[xxi] Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, p. 451.
[xxii] Martin P. Johnson, Writing the Gettysburg Address, p. 138, 147.
[xxiii] The building has gone by several names throughout its history. At the time of the battle it would have been known simply as “the Seminary” or “the Seminary building” because it was the only academic structure on the campus (though professors and their families occupied homes on both the north and south sides of the building). In later years, it was known as “Old Dorm” and “Schmucker Hall,” names which some sources still use today. Its use as the main Seminary building ceased in 1895, though it was used as a dormitory until the end of the 1953-1954 academic year. Adams County Historical Society secured the rights to use the structure in 1959, and occupied the building for five decades, from 1961 to 2011. As of July 1, 2013, the building is occupied by the Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum.
[xxiv] For a complete history of the Lutheran Seminary see Abdel Wentz, Gettysburg Lutheran Theological Seminary, 1826-1965. For a history of the Seminary building’s tenure as a field hospital see Michael A. Dreese, The Hospital on Seminary Ridge at the Battle of Gettysburg.
[xxv] Warren, p. 75.
[xxvi] “The American Necropolis” in Cincinnati Daily Commercial, November 23, 1863.
[xxvii] Samuel Simon Schmucker, “Letter outlining damage to Seminary Building,” in Schmucker Hall Historic Structures Report, Appendix F: Selected Civil War-era Materials Relating to Schmucker Hall.
[xxviii] Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Theological Seminary, Volume II, pp. 3-4.
[xxix] Dreese, p. 149.
[xxx] Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Theological Seminary, Volume III, p. 333.
[xxxi] Schmucker Hall Historic Structures Report, p. 6-19.
[xxxii] Ibid, pp. 341-342, 349. The “permanent improvements” consisted of purchasing “better equipment” for the campus refectory (dining hall), “toilet and bath facilities in the dormitory,” and most notably, “the handsome portico on the West front of the Seminary Dormitory,” according to the May 21, 1914, board minutes. The portico—officially named the Peace Portico—was dedicated that day in honor of the “more than 50,000 veterans of the Civil War” who had assembled at Gettysburg the previous summer, who exhibited “promulgating sentiments of peace and fraternity between the once hostile elements of our people,” according to an official report written by the Reverend J.A. Singmaster, president of the Seminary.
[xxxiii] Cincinnati Daily Commercial, November 23, 1863.
[xxxiv] Dreese, “Ordeal in the Lutheran Theological Seminary,” in The Gettysburg Magazine, pp. 101-102. Two of the Ziegler children, Hugh and Lydia, published their reminiscences from the battle in the later years of their lives.
[xxxv] Cincinnati Daily Commercial, November 23, 1863.
While interpretations have been disassembled and reassembled time and again in the 150-plus years since “the tall man” who “spoke slowly, and with…penetrating clarity”[ii] delivered his now-immortal oration, one thing has remained clear: the address came from Lincoln’s heart, Lincoln’s experiences, and Lincoln’s gifted, lyrical mind, so much so that the speech has remained a staple of American literary tradition, and of the American way of life. It is the quintessential American creed, a “Gospel” that “was born” in the midst of civil war, a fitting tribute full of “gushing gratitude toward the brave fallen of the rank and file.”[iii]
The Gettysburg Address is perhaps the most revered speech from one of America’s most revered writers. Lincoln is universally lauded as the archetypal poet-president, with speeches and letters that have brought people all over the world to action, and to tears, for centuries. His words have been the rallying cries for patriots, civil rights activists, and Americans of all backgrounds everywhere. His image is inarguably the most recognizable amongst historical figures of the United States. “Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world,” Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1908. He was “so great that he overshadows all other national heroes,” with “supremacy” that “expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.”[iv]
Lincoln’s speech at the dedication of Soldiers’ National Cemetery on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, was his first major public oration in nearly two-and-a-half years; in fact, he had not appeared in front of a crowd that size—by most accounts, somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 onlookers—since his inauguration on March 4, 1861. In his inaugural address—delivered a month before the South fired on Fort Sumter, which started the Civil War—Lincoln called on Northerners and Southerners to consider the costs of “the momentous issue of civil war,” and proclaimed, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Lincoln, in a final attempt at avoiding “destruction of the Union,” told the nation that “passion may have strained,” but “it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union.” In closing, Lincoln presented his wish that “my dissatisfied fellow countrymen” would be “touched…by the better angels of our nature.”[v]
When he was asked by those organizing the dedicatory events at Gettysburg to deliver his now-famous “few appropriate remarks”—primarily Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin and Gettysburg attorney David Wills—Lincoln was initially hesitant. He would not be the main speaker; that honor belonged to Edward Everett, the president of Harvard and America’s most-gifted orator. Lincoln, of course, eventually accepted the offer, and got to work on “a speech ‘worthy of the occasion,’” which “he had been preparing for…all of his adult life,”[vi] due to his disposition that “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence” and Thomas Jefferson’s timeless proclamation that “all men are created equal.”[vii]
Soon after Lincoln initially delivered the address, a legend arose suggesting Lincoln had hurriedly written the speech as an afterthought on his way to the ceremony, during a train ride not 24 hours prior to the dedication of the new National Cemetery near the small Pennsylvania town that had seen 51,000 men fall victim to battlefield wounds, enemy capture, and outright death over the course of three days in July 1863. This tale was precipitated by men like Ward Hill Lamon, a “particular friend” who Lincoln had befriended in 1847 or 1848, and who worked with Lincoln as an “occasional law partner, political associate, government appointee, unofficial advisor, occasional emissary, personal bodyguard, boon companion, and eventually, biographer.” He was, in fact, author of “the only reminiscences recorded by a friend who knew Lincoln in both his Illinois and Washington years, as…an attorney, a candidate, and as President of the United States.”[viii]
In his memoirs, originally published in 1895, Lamon authored a chapter called “The True History of the Gettysburg Address,” in which he asserted, “A day or two before the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Mr. Lincoln told me…that he was extremely busy, and had no time” to prepare a speech. “From his hat,” continued Lamon, “he drew a sheet of foolscap, one side of which was closely written with what he informed me was a memorandum of his intended address. This he read to me...It proved to be in substance…what was afterwards printed as his famous Gettysburg speech.” After Lincoln delivered the address on November 19, Lamon lamented that Lincoln believed “that speech won’t scour! It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed,” an anecdotal piece that has not held up against the facts.[ix] “No one will ever settle the debate over whether Lincoln’s most famous speech was rhapsodically or indifferently received,” writes Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, though a young reporter from Harrisburg, Joseph Ignatius Gilbert, who received “the president’s handwritten manuscript to check it against his shorthand transcription” admitted that he saw confidence when the president “glanced up from his manuscript with a faraway look in his eyes as if appealing from the few thousands below him to the countless millions whom his words were to reach.”[x]
Many historians have concluded that Lamon’s assertion that (a) Lincoln had written his address quickly and (b) that initially he did not think it was effective, though it became legendary, are representative of Lamon’s bias—that he wanted to manufacture a mentality in which Lincoln was almost superhuman in his ability to write legendary speeches at a moment’s notice.
In reality, through the half-dozen or so modern full-length studies on the Gettysburg Address, historians agree that Lincoln spent a great deal of time deliberating over exactly which elements, themes, and individual words and clauses he would include in the dedicatory oration. Drawing on classical techniques of the Greek revival period, statements of equality in the Declaration of Independence, Judeo-Christian notions, and several other forms of oratory and literary styles, Lincoln collected ideas and molded them into the phrases now so famous amongst anyone with an ounce of familiarity with Lincoln the writer. As noted earlier, it was a speech that he was, in many ways, born to write, though the people of his time—and likely Lincoln himself—did not realize it would take hold of the human imagination as it has since that November day.
Lincoln had likely been considering what he would say since the days after the battle at Gettysburg had concluded. In July, on the lawn of the Executive Mansion, Lincoln had said, “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 own representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’”[xi] Lincoln eventually molded this into a more biblical, poetic clause: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In this fashion, he constructed the bulk of his address, as he had done with a substantive piece of his professional and personal writings, letters, and speeches—a scrap of paper here, a clause there, a quote here, an idea there.
Regardless of his apparent determination to conjure up “a few appropriate remarks” in honor of “soldiers…killed at the Battle of Gettysburg”[xii] in the weeks before the ceremony, it appears he did not spend “every passing hour…meditating on his short speech,”[xiii] though it was “likely very much on the president’s mind.” On November 8, while posing “for a new suite of portraits” at Alexander’s Gardner’s gallery in Washington, Sacramento Bee correspondent Noah Brooks asked Lincoln if “the president [had] written his own speech yet,” to which Lincoln responded that he had, but that he had “not yet finished” the draft, which was “short, short, short.”[xiv] Over the next ten days, prior to leaving Washington for Gettysburg on November 18, Lincoln worked from time to time on the speech, polishing particular elements, and adding or detracting others. But it was not until the night before—and even more so, the morning of—the dedication ceremony that Lincoln wrote everything he had to write, so that he could say everything that he felt needed to be said.
When he arrived at the train station in Gettysburg, just north of the town’s central Diamond (modern Lincoln Square) there was great adulation and pomp throughout the streets of this small, carriage-manufacturing, shoe-cobbling, agricultural community which had not quite been itself since June 30 of that year. One resident wrote, “Our old town is roused up to action,” as people were “whopping, singing, carrying on”[xv] and “celebrants were growing tipsier and louder by the minute.”[xvi] It was a far cry from the downtrodden vibe that had swept over the town since July 1, 2, and 3, 1863, when the bloodiest battle of the war had “completely broken up” any sense of “tranquility of the little town.”[xvii] The battle had left at least 7,000 dead humans, 3,000 dead horses, and 20,000 wounded soldiers behind, with dozens of field hospitals occupying farmhouses, barns, schools, churches, and the two institutions of higher education in the town—Pennsylvania (now Gettysburg) College and the Lutheran Theological Seminary.
“The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable—corpses swollen to twice their original size, some of them actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gasses and vapors,” wrote one Union officer on a burial crew soon after the battle’s conclusion. “The odors were nauseating, and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely.”[xviii] “Hands and skulls no longer protruded from the soil,” but “the rubble of war seemed everywhere”[xix] upon Lincoln’s arrival, though the positive nighttime atmosphere on November 18 made the situation appear otherwise.
After delivering what his private secretary John Hay described as “half a dozen words meaning nothing,”[xx] Lincoln retired to his room on the second floor of the Wills house, though “No one knows whether Lincoln went to bed that night. The unrelenting noise from drunken revelers thronging the streets must have made it difficult, even impossible, to sleep.”[xxi] At some point that evening, Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, who was staying next door at the Harper House, “almost certainly discussed…visiting the battlefield in the morning before the procession to the cemetery.” Specifically, Lincoln wanted to see what Seward described to a reporter as “the ground around the Seminary.”[xxii]
About one mile west, on the other side of town from where Lincoln resided for the night, sat—and still sits—the five-story brick edifice of the main building at the Lutheran Theological Seminary.[xxiii] Having been initially completed in 1832, the structure served several functions for 31 years prior to the battle, including those of dormitories, classrooms, a library, chapel, professors’ offices, and a dining facility. Due to its physical size, voluminous capacity, and proximity to the initial fighting on July 1, 1863—it sat just a few hundred yards east of McPherson’s Ridge, where the bulk of the morning action took place—the Seminary building became a natural location for one of Gettysburg’s largest and longest-serving field hospitals. Between 600 and 700 soldiers from both sides (though mostly Union) filled its halls and surrounding fields for two-and-a-half months, until Lieutenant Colonel George F. McFarland of the 151st Pennsylvania left on September 16, 1863.[xxiv]
On the night of November 18, the Seminary functioned as a hotel, since “Every available room in the town was utilized,” leaving those in charge of “fraternal organizations, churches, and the colleges that had served as hospitals” no choice but for their sizable structures’ doors to be “thrown open so that all might have shelter.”[xxv] One such guest was a reporter from the Cincinnati Daily Commercial who wrote that he “was fortunate in securing quarters at the Theological Seminary,” and recognized the building’s purpose as a “witness to as much misery, heroic endurance, and patient resignation, as any building ever erected by man.” He also saw “where a shell from our batteries passed through the wall to several rooms, and finally rested on a closet shelf—the door where a brutal Confederate Colonel shot down a Union soldier, who was bearing in a bleeding and dying comrade.”[xxvi]
The fact that the reporter—and presumably many other visitors—were welcome guests at the Seminary building that evening is an intriguing development, based on the fact that the Seminary Board of Directors was adamantly opposed to the Union army’s occupation of the structure while it served as a hospital. The Seminary’s founder and president, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Simon Schmucker, wrote in mid-July 1863, “I recommend that a communication be addressed to the supreme medical authority at Washington urging the reasons why the interests of the Seminary should not be unnecessarily sacrificed to the convenience of these medical officials.”[xxvii] On August 11, the board—which “assembled at the appointed hour in Dr. Schmucker’s study,” seconded Schmucker’s motion when it resolved that a committee “be appointed to proceed to Washington, if necessary, & urge upon the Medical Authorities there, the desireableness & importance of vacating the building as soon as possible,” so that “the work of all necessary repairs” to the structure could begin “as soon as the Government shall have vacated the building from its present use as a general hospital.” The Seminary wanted to resume its preparations for the fall semester, and in order to “apply to the proper authorities in such cases provided, for the purpose of settling the damages sustained by the Seminary Edifice whilst used by the Government as a general hospital,” officials needed the building to be completely empty.[xxviii]
Despite their obvious displeasure over the hospital’s longstanding tenure, however, Schmucker and other Seminary faculty—as well as several Seminary students—appear to have been polite to the patients during their stay. Dr. Charles Krauth, a professor at the institution, told McFarland that “he could stay in the building as long as he pleased,” and several days later McFarland wrote, “Dr. Schmucker, Pres. of the Seminary has been to see me twice. He is very pleasant and said if I remained 2 or even 3 more weeks it would make no difference—he would teach me Theology.”[xxix] Obviously, there were some discrepancies in the faculty members’ public rhetoric versus their treatment of the wounded soldiers, who had no choice but to stay due to their unfortunate and miserable circumstances. McFarland, for instance, had a leg amputated on July 2, and was in such a deprived state that his family was allowed to stay with him for several weeks before his departure.
The Seminary’s apparent open-door policy during the night of November 18 exhibits a change of heart, though it still presents an ambiguous situation. The board did not mention the building’s use as a hotel in any meeting minutes after the occasion. Five decades later, in a similar situation, as Civil War veterans across the nation prepared for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the board resolved that it “does not regard…use [of] the Seminary buildings during the celebration of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913” as a “feasible…use of the Seminary Buildings”[xxx] based on a doctrine signed in 1903 that the Seminary did “not want any involvement” with being used “for secular purposes” such as those “related to the encampments…held in honor of the Civil War battle.”[xxxi]
On May 8, 1913, however, the board rescinded its previous “action…taken on May 16 1912 delaying the use of the buildings by visitors to the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Battle,” and decided to open its doors in exchange for “fair compensation” from “the government team” who “desires the use of our buildings for distinguished guests.” The “government team” that came from June 28 to July 7, 1913, was known as the Pennsylvania Commission, and contained a reported 527 guests. The Seminary’s wish was granted, too, as it received $2,938.70, according to the May 21, 1914, board minutes, “of which about one half was profit through careful and unpaid management and this profit has been invested in permanent improvements.”[xxxii]
In November 1863, it appears that the Seminary had not yet instituted any sort of ban on using the building for secular purposes, at least for the occasion pertaining to Lincoln being in town. The aforementioned reporter from Cincinnati interviewed Emmanuel Ziegler, “an intelligent and patriotic man”[xxxiii] who served as the steward of the Seminary, and whose wife, Mary, and their five children lived in the ground floor of the Seminary building at the time of the battle.[xxxiv]
The reporter noted that “a thousand tales of war and its incidents, which history will not record, but which tradition may perceive, cluster around this building, and for all time to come will make it a celebrated spot for the pilgrim to the battle ground.”[xxxv] Little did he know that the next morning the sixteenth President of the United States would become one of those pilgrims....
To read this piece in its entirety, stay tuned for publication information. The full publication will likely be coming sometime in 2016. I apologize for the wait and continued delays to this point. My research and writing is an ongoing process, and the general purpose and direction of this project has taken on a new, expansive, and more fulfilling and meaningful objective.
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Notes
[i] Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, p. 40.
[ii] Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg, p. 482.
[iii] Gabor Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, p. 129.
[iv] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals, p. 748.
[v] Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address” in Abraham Lincoln Selected Writings, pp. 619, 624.
[vi] Ibid. “Speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” pp. 613-614.
[vii] Guelzo, p. 476.
[viii] Harold Holzer, “Foreword” in Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847-1865, pp. vii-viii.
[ix] Lamon, p. 184.
[x] Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, p. 453.
[xi] Lincoln, “Response to a Serenade,” July 7, 1863 in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. VI, p. 319.
[xii] David Wills to Lincoln. Letter. November 2, 1863, in Robert Fortenbaugh, Lincoln and Gettysburg, p. 36.
[xiii] Louis A. Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Declaration, p. 71.
[xiv] Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, pp. 449-450. The quote regarding the length of the draft at that time may be found in nearly all popular modern published works on the Gettysburg Address.
[xv] Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, pp. 69, 75.
[xvi] Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, p. 451.
[xvii] Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, p. 73.
[xviii] Gregory A. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land, p. 73.
[xix] Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel, p. 91.
[xx] John Hay. Diary. November 20, 1863, in Tyler Dennett, ed. Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay, p. 120.
[xxi] Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press, p. 451.
[xxii] Martin P. Johnson, Writing the Gettysburg Address, p. 138, 147.
[xxiii] The building has gone by several names throughout its history. At the time of the battle it would have been known simply as “the Seminary” or “the Seminary building” because it was the only academic structure on the campus (though professors and their families occupied homes on both the north and south sides of the building). In later years, it was known as “Old Dorm” and “Schmucker Hall,” names which some sources still use today. Its use as the main Seminary building ceased in 1895, though it was used as a dormitory until the end of the 1953-1954 academic year. Adams County Historical Society secured the rights to use the structure in 1959, and occupied the building for five decades, from 1961 to 2011. As of July 1, 2013, the building is occupied by the Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum.
[xxiv] For a complete history of the Lutheran Seminary see Abdel Wentz, Gettysburg Lutheran Theological Seminary, 1826-1965. For a history of the Seminary building’s tenure as a field hospital see Michael A. Dreese, The Hospital on Seminary Ridge at the Battle of Gettysburg.
[xxv] Warren, p. 75.
[xxvi] “The American Necropolis” in Cincinnati Daily Commercial, November 23, 1863.
[xxvii] Samuel Simon Schmucker, “Letter outlining damage to Seminary Building,” in Schmucker Hall Historic Structures Report, Appendix F: Selected Civil War-era Materials Relating to Schmucker Hall.
[xxviii] Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Theological Seminary, Volume II, pp. 3-4.
[xxix] Dreese, p. 149.
[xxx] Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Theological Seminary, Volume III, p. 333.
[xxxi] Schmucker Hall Historic Structures Report, p. 6-19.
[xxxii] Ibid, pp. 341-342, 349. The “permanent improvements” consisted of purchasing “better equipment” for the campus refectory (dining hall), “toilet and bath facilities in the dormitory,” and most notably, “the handsome portico on the West front of the Seminary Dormitory,” according to the May 21, 1914, board minutes. The portico—officially named the Peace Portico—was dedicated that day in honor of the “more than 50,000 veterans of the Civil War” who had assembled at Gettysburg the previous summer, who exhibited “promulgating sentiments of peace and fraternity between the once hostile elements of our people,” according to an official report written by the Reverend J.A. Singmaster, president of the Seminary.
[xxxiii] Cincinnati Daily Commercial, November 23, 1863.
[xxxiv] Dreese, “Ordeal in the Lutheran Theological Seminary,” in The Gettysburg Magazine, pp. 101-102. Two of the Ziegler children, Hugh and Lydia, published their reminiscences from the battle in the later years of their lives.
[xxxv] Cincinnati Daily Commercial, November 23, 1863.
