The Gospel of Gettysburg: The Story Behind the Story of the Gettysburg Address

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories. Up next, the story behind the story of Lincoln’s greatest speech, the Gettysburg Address. And we rely a lot on a terrific book called The Gettysburg Gospel by Hungarian-born historian Gabor Boritt, who was the director at the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. And I have a particular love affair with Gettysburg because my dad went to college there, and I have walked the battlegrounds and taken trips all the way down to Vicksburg with my dad. And now, the story behind the story of the Gettysburg Address. He arrived in the small Pennsylvania town on November 18th, 1863, a day before he was to give one of his few national addresses. He wasn’t alone. Gettysburg’s population at the time was less than 3,000, but nearly 15,000 people would gather the very next day at the official dedication ceremony, but the National Cemetery on the site of one of the bloodiest and most decisive battles of the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln arrived early because he wanted to see the battlefield, to see in person what he had only seen before on maps and official reports. He wanted to see the ground and walk the ground. It is said that it is a place, if you let it, where the land will speak to you. It spoke to Lincoln. He visited the battlefields by carriage with only a few people, wandering the grounds for hours. Only four months earlier, in early July, an even larger gathering of humanity made its way to those very same battlefield. General Robert E. Lee showed up with 75,000 men, General George Meade with 100,000. Three days later, Gettysburg was the site of the worst man-made disaster in American history. The first chapter of Gabor Boritt’s remarkable book, The Gospel of Gettysburg, described what the small town was like in the weeks after the fighting ended. Stench fills the air: excrement from perhaps 180,000 men and more than 70,000 horses left behind. There are thousands of flies, millions dead men, barely covered in shallow graves. A nurse writes of carcasses steaming in the sun. When strangers approached the town, the odors of the battlefield attacked them, long before they got there. Perhaps no one wrote more eloquently about the carnage, according to Boritt, than a volunteer nurse from Philadelphia, Eliza Farnham.

00:03:11
Speaker 2: The whole town is one vast hospital. It is absolutely inconceivable: the dead and dying and wounded torn to pieces in every way. Moans, shrieks, weeping, and prayer fill houses, the barns, the tents, the fields, the woods, the whole area; the land itself seems to wail. Nothing but suffering: sights, sounds, smells, unbearable horror; the piles of limb-stripping blood, the dying, the dead—hell on earth.

00:04:08
Speaker 1: It was a brutal battle, with over 80,000 casualties, but it was also a pivotal battle. General Lee was hoping a loss at Gettysburg, just a short distance from a great Northern city like Philadelphia, might be enough to prompt Northerners to call it quits and turn Lincoln out in the upcoming election in 1864. President Lincoln, too, understood the importance of the speech he was about to give. He understood that the American people were sick and tired of the bloodshed that continued day after day, year after year. What was Lincoln trying to accomplish with his short address? Again, I quote Gabor Boritt. He was trying to tell the American people why the war must go on, why it mattered, and why it was worthwhile, why the United States had to be saved. The speech is not simply a benediction or a blessing on the dead. It is a call to action. It’s telling Americans, ‘This is who we are.’ It’s worth fighting for and dying for. President Lincoln’s address followed was supposed to be, by all accounts, the real Gettysburg Address—that by former U.S. Senator and Harvard College president Edward Everett—which clocked in at nearly two hours and contained 13,670 words, all forgotten. Then Lincoln rose. As David McCullough pointed out in the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War, a local photographer was taking his time focusing. Presumably, the photographer thought Lincoln could be counted on to go on for a while. But Lincoln spoke just 269 words. As he was heading back to his seat, the photographer had just opened the shutter. There were no pictures of Lincoln giving his most famous address. The address was not famous, though when it was finished, a lot of newspapers didn’t even mention it. Those that did gave the speech a mixed reception. Republican newspapers praised it, and Democrats viewed it as the beginning of Lincoln’s reelection campaign, belittling or ignoring it altogether. One Democrat newspaper called the speech a mawkish harangue. The speech was pretty much forgotten until the 1880s. This was before the age of radio, TV, and YouTube. But as Gettysburg increasingly became a symbol of reconciliation and reunion between North and South, Lincoln’s address took on more and more meaning. Why will the Gettysburg Address be forever remembered again? I quote Gabor Boritt. The radical aspect of the speech began with Lincoln’s assertion that the Declaration of Independence, and not the Constitution, was the true expression of the Founding Fathers’ intentions for their new nation. At that time, many white slave owners had declared themselves to be true Americans, pointing to the fact that the Constitution did not prohibit slavery. According to Lincoln, the nation formed in 1776 was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, an interpretation that was radical at the time but is now taken for granted. Lincoln’s historic address redefined the Civil War as a struggle not just for the Union, but for the principle of human equality. Lincoln, under the very worst of circumstances, gave a speech that will be remembered for all time. Hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and died to make America a more complete Union in those long four years, a more just and free nation. And now, here to do a reading of the Gettysburg Address, brought to us by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

00:08:16
Speaker 3: Forced Corn. 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’ve come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for 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 handle this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detracted. 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 which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. And from these other dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolved that these days shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

00:10:33
Speaker 1: The story of the story behind the Gettysburg Address here on Our American Stories.