n the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address are etched in stone. The memorial has three chambers. The central one features the statue of the seated Lincoln. The other two present the two famous speeches. In the South Chamber, the 272-word Gettysburg Address appears on a wall in a single panel. In the North Chamber, the 698-word Second Inaugural Address is reproduced in three panels side by side.
Given the windiness of political speeches (especially nineteenth-century ones), it is astonishing that two of the greatest speeches of all time are short enough to fit on a wall and can be read in a matter of minutes. The marvelous brevity of the speeches shows that Lincoln was a master of what the neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux calls parsimony in art—that is, explaining much with little, finding a pattern in the midst of apparent disorder. In art, Changeux detects “a certain economy of means revealed as a bold line, a convincing brushstroke, a contrasting juxtaposition of colors, all creating sensory consonance, and endowing a work of quality with its own unique harmony.”1
We find the “bold line,” the “juxtaposition of colors,” and “unique harmony” in both of Lincoln’s finest speeches, whose rhythmic sentences are literary brushstrokes that deliver timeless truths about human equality, justice, and charity. The speeches are prime examples of what might be called political parsimony. They reduce many progressive concepts to fundamental egalitarian principles that still survive in the world’s collective consciousness.
Reading the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural today, one is tempted to view them as statements by a sage who looked beyond and above his era. They were not. They gained transcendent power because Lincoln responded attentively to the America of his time and absorbed its most enlightened currents. The speeches were extracts of cultural and social forces, produced by the most receptive and principled president America has had.
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS IN CONTEXT
The progress from the Battle of Gettysburg in early July 1863 to the Gettysburg Address on November 19 was a journey from chaos and death to Lincoln’s affirmation of order, justice, and national regeneration.
First, the chaos and death. The Battle of Gettysburg produced the most casualties of any Civil War battle—more than 23,000 dead, missing, or wounded on each side. The three-day engagement epitomized the firestorm that was the Civil War. Robert E. Lee’s post-Chancellorsville invasion of the North, with its uncharacteristic miscues; the collision of the rebels and the federals at the Pennsylvania crossroads town of Gettysburg; on the first day, the clashes that pushed the federals from north of the town to the hills south of it; on the second and third days, the assaults by Lee’s forces on the entrenched enemy; the fights to the death at the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, the Wheat Field, Culp’s Hill, and Little Round Top; the desperate charge of 15,000 yelling rebels under George Pickett on the Union center at Cemetery Ridge, followed by the frenzied Confederate retreat and Meade’s bungled pursuit of Lee—all are part of Civil War lore.
Then the horrific aftermath of this Northern victory. South and west of Gettysburg, the corpses of soldiers and horses stretched for miles. One witness reported, “All was a trodden, miry waste, with corpses at every step, and the thick littered débris of battle.”2 For days, bodies decayed in the summer rain and sun. Vultures swarmed, and hogs rooted at the bodies. The sickening stench of rotting flesh filled the town. All the houses, stores, barns, and other structures in the area became hospitals, including the four-story building of the Pennsylvania College of Gettysburg. The dying and wounded received care from selfless women of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, but doctors were in short supply.
Burying the dead was grueling. The bodies of Confederates were dumped by the hundreds into trenches and covered with earth. The Union fallen received careful attention. Letters, receipts, diaries, and other personal items assisted in identifying the dead. At first an effort was made to ship bodies that could be identified in coffins to soldiers’ families, but after several hundred shipments this gruesome task ceased. Instead, federal soldiers were buried where they lay in shallow graves marked by rough boards on which their names were scribbled in pencil.
Someone recognized the inadequacy of these temporary graves and had the idea of turning the battle site into a national cemetery. David Wills, a Gettysburg lawyer who supervised the postbattle activities, got the approval of Pennsylvania authorities and Lincoln himself to develop the cemetery. Wills purchased for the state some twenty-two acres in a boot-shaped area on a slope about a half mile south of the town, where the Union dead would be interred. In the cemetery, designed by landscape gardener and horticulturist William Saunders, the bodies were buried in sections for the eighteen states where the soldiers had come from. Those states contributed funds to the project, as did the federal government. Transferring the dead from the battlefield to the cemetery began in October and ended in March 1864; in all, 3,512 bodies were buried, about a third of them in two large sections called Unknown.
The cemetery symbolized the unification of Northern states around a common cause. Lincoln met with Saunders and was “much pleased” with the layout, commenting that it “differed from the ordinary cemetery.”4 Unlike the dispersed, natural design of rural cemeteries, with their groups of graves clustered separately by individual families, the Gettysburg Cemetery placed the dead in parallel rows of half circles with a sixty-foot statue of the Genius of Liberty at their center. The headstones were arranged in symmetrical arcs of short granite blocks, with names and ranks inscribed on them, creating a democracy in death that subsumed individuality to the goals of Union and Liberty. “The cemetery at Gettysburg,” Drew Gilpin Faust notes, “was arranged so that every grave was of equal importance; William Saunders’s design, like Lincoln’s speech, affirmed that every dead soldier mattered equally regardless of rank or station.”5
In August 1863, Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin began organizing a dedication ceremony in honor of those killed at Gettysburg. The speaker who first came to mind was Edward Everett. He was a natural choice. Over the years, the distinguished Everett had been a Unitarian minister, the president of Harvard College, a US congressman and senator, secretary of state under Millard Fillmore, and the running mate of Constitutional Union Party presidential candidate John Bell in 1860. Above all, Everett was an orator, prepared to speak at important events of all kinds. After his death in 1865, a eulogist asked, “On what occasion of honor to the living and the dead,—at what commemoration to the glorious past,—in what exigency of the present moment,—have those lips ever been mute?”6
Many considered Everett a modern-day Demosthenes. His moderate position on slavery helped him appeal to a varied audience. On September 23, David Wills invited him to be the main speaker at Gettysburg. The silver-haired, sixty-nine-year-old Everett accepted, with the caveat that he would not be available until November 19. The date was thus set. Organizing the ceremony was put under the command of Lincoln’s close friend Ward Hill Lamon, the US marshal for the District of Columbia, and Major General Darius N. Couch. Lincoln was expected to participate in this important event. Governor Curtin visited him in late October, and on November 2 Wills sent the president a note asking if he might like to give “a few appropriate remarks” at the ceremony.7 Lincoln accepted the invitation.
He spent the two and half weeks before his trip to Gettysburg carrying on his usual duties as war president and otherwise occupying himself. Twice he visited the photographic studios of Alexander and James Gardner to have his portrait taken. On November 9, he went to Ford’s Theatre and saw John Wilkes Booth in the lead role as a Greek sculptor in The Marble Heart. Three days later, he went alone to the wedding of Kate Chase and William Sprague (Mary, who hated the lovely, wasp-waisted Kate, stayed away). On November 17, the California senator John Conness presented Lincoln with a cane that had been a gift from his predecessor, the tough-fisted b’hoy politician James C. Broderick. Lincoln said he had never met Broderick but had heard enough good things about him to say that receiving a memento of Broderick’s was “a fact he would remember through all the years of his life.”8
Meanwhile, he mulled over his speech. He wanted to deliver a message about the meaning of the war. He had hinted the message in some impromptu words he had spoken on July 7, just after the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. He told a crowd of serenaders, “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.’” He added, “Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.”9
He was so excited about having halted Lee’s northern advance that on July 19 he scribbled a giddy verse he called “Gen. Lees invasion of the North written by himself”:
In eighteen sixty three, with pomp,
and mighty swell,
Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went
forth to sack Phil-del
The Yankees they got arter us
and giv us particular hell
And we skedaddled back again
and didn’t sack Phil-del.10
Here, like his favorite humorist, Petroleum Nasby, he impersonated the enemy in order to debunk him. His tone was not as caustic as Nasby’s, but he used the same techniques—vernacular language, misspellings, the assault on Southern chivalry—that were staples of David Ross Locke’s humor.
Like Locke, Lincoln delivered a serious message in a humorous format. Unlike Locke, he possessed another gift: the capability of expressing serious ideals in truly memorable language. The invitation to the Gettysburg ceremony offered him the opportunity he had been waiting for. The legend that he scribbled his address on an envelope on his train ride to Gettysburg is just that—a legend—as is the story that he composed it spontaneously just before he gave the speech. Several days before Gettysburg, Simon Cameron visited Lincoln, who showed him the speech, written in pencil on commercial note paper, saying he had taken “great pains in writing it.”11 Around the same time he told the journalist Noah Brooks, “I have written it over, two or three times, and I shall have to give it another lick before I am satisfied.”12 The speech was substantially done by the time he left for Gettysburg on November 18.
The president’s train was scheduled to leave Washington at noon that day. But Tad had fallen ill, and Mary was panicking over the boy’s condition. Lincoln delayed going to the station in order to attend to his wife and son. James Fry, the official who picked him up at the White House at eleven thirty, tried to speed him up. Lincoln answered Fry by telling him the story of a convicted man in Illinois who was on the way to the gallows and, seeing crowds rushing ahead to see him hang, called out, “Boys, you needn’t be in such a hurry to get ahead, there won’t be any fun until I get there.”13
The special train had four cars; its locomotive was festooned with patriotic bunting and streamers. Lincoln sat in a section of the rear car. Also on board were three cabinet members—Seward, Blair, and Usher—along with other government officials and citizens. The train reached Gettysburg at sundown. Lincoln was taken to the home of David Wills, who had invited him to stay the night. Wills held a dinner attended by thirty-eight luminaries, including a foreign diplomat and a French admiral. In the evening, the town’s usually quiet streets were alive with shouting, singing, and laughter from the crowds who had come to attend the ceremony. Liquor flowed, and pickpockets plied their trade. Serenades by a military band and glee clubs wafted through the night.
Calls rang out for Lincoln and Seward. The president appeared at a window and waved. He said he did not want to speak that evening, adding that it was important as president that he “not say any foolish things.” Someone cried, “If you can help it,” to which he replied, “It very often happens that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all.”14 The crowd laughed and cheered. Seward gave a brief, bland speech as Lincoln retired to his room. The president looked over his speech and at eleven made his way, under guard, next door, where Seward was staying, so that the secretary of state could read it as well.
The next morning, Lincoln accompanied Seward on a tour of the battleground north of town where the clashes between the armies had occurred on the first day. At ten, Lincoln was escorted to the diamond-shaped town center, where a procession was forming that would go to the cemetery south of the town for the ceremony. The crowd yelled, “Hurrah for Old Abe!,” “We are coming Father Abraham!,” and “God save the President!”15 He mounted a bay horse so small that his long legs nearly reached the ground. Waiting for the parade to begin, Lincoln sat on his horse, shook hands with well-wishers, and was cheered by a telegram reporting good news from Grant in Tennessee and another one saying that his son Tad was better. The procession soon started moving. It included cabinet members, state governors, military officers, civic societies, and bands. Citizens and journalists took up the rear.
Passing through the town, the paraders could see houses and walls pocked with bullet holes and children selling battle relics. Outside of town, there appeared a ravaged landscape. Trees had been peeled by musket fire or reduced to splintered trunks by shells. Strewn about were the skeletons of horses, muddy knapsacks, old shoes, canteens, cartridge boxes, and scraps of uniforms. Here and there lay a human skull. Even in this grim surrounding, socializing and chatter abounded. Thousands had come for the ceremony, and many strolled through the historic battlefield, gathering souvenirs, talking politics, and courting.
The crowd of fifteen thousand quieted down when it gathered to watch the dedication ceremony, which began at 11:30 a.m. Many officials in the parade took seats arranged in three rows on a low twelve-foot-by-twenty-foot platform. Lincoln sat on an old, cushionless settee between Everett and Seward. A chaplain’s long opening prayer was followed by Everett’s oration. Then Lincoln spoke
