A New Birth of Freedom

In July 1863 two armies fought for three days at Gettysburg and left roughly 10,000 men killed or mortally wounded. That fall the Northern states built a cemetery for the Union dead on the battlefield. The president was invited to add a few remarks after the main oration. He used them to say what the war, and the country, were for.

1. 1–3 July 1863

   Three days in July

   Robert E. Lee’s army invades Pennsylvania and collides with the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg. For three days the armies fight across the fields and hills around the town, from the stand on Little Round Top to the repulse of Pickett’s Charge. Roughly 10,000 men are killed or mortally wounded. On 4 July Lee retreats toward Virginia. The Union dead lie in hasty graves all over the field.

2. Summer and fall 1863

   A cemetery for the Union dead

   David Wills, a Gettysburg attorney acting for Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin, rallies the Northern states behind one national cemetery. They buy 17 acres on Cemetery Hill. William Saunders of the Department of Agriculture lays out the graves in semicircles, state by state, around a central monument, officers and privates side by side. Reburials begin on 27 October. At the White House, Lincoln studies the plan and calls it an admirable and befitting arrangement.

3. 2 November

   A few appropriate remarks

   Edward Everett, the most celebrated orator in the country, was invited in September to give the main address. The ceremony, first set for 23 October, has moved to 19 November to give him time to prepare. Now Wills writes to the president. He makes clear the oration belongs to Everett. In a personal note sent the same day, he asks Lincoln to stay at his own house.

   David Wills to the President, 2 November 1863It is the desire that, after the Oration, you, as Chief Executive of the Nation, formally set apart these grounds to their Sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.
4. 18 November · Evening

   The night before

   Lincoln’s special train leaves Washington at noon and pulls into Gettysburg about nightfall. Wills gives him a large upstairs bedroom in his house on the town square. The streets are packed with visitors, and serenaders call for the president. He says a few words from the doorway and goes back upstairs to his speech. The first page is already written, on Executive Mansion paper. In this room he finishes it.

5. 19 November · 10:00

   The procession

   Dignitaries gather outside the Wills house at ten. Lincoln rides to the cemetery on a chestnut horse too small for his long frame, among soldiers, bands and officials. About 15,000 people are waiting. Around noon a camera on the field records the crowd packed around the platform. Eighty-nine years later, archivist Josephine Cobb finds Lincoln in the picture, bareheaded among the dignitaries on the platform.

   

6. 19 November · Midday

   Two hours of Everett

   A band plays, the Rev. Thomas Stockton prays, and the Marine Band plays Old Hundred. Then Everett rises. He has studied the reports of the battle and corresponded with its generals, and he speaks for two hours, from memory, more than 13,000 words. He carries the crowd through all three days of the fighting. A hymn written for the day by Benjamin B. French follows. Next on the printed program: Dedicatory Remarks, by the President of the United States.

7. 19 November · Afternoon

   Four score and seven years ago

   Lincoln stands. The journalist John Russell Young watches him draw steel-framed spectacles from an old case and adjust them with care. He holds a few sheets of paper. His first sentence reaches back 87 years, to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, and to its proposition that all men are created equal. The war, he says, is testing whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

8. 19 November · Two minutes

   The unfinished work

   The ground is already consecrated, he says, by the brave men who struggled here. It is for the living to take up the unfinished work they so nobly advanced, so that the nation shall have a new birth of freedom. Ten sentences, about two minutes. The newspaper transcripts wired from Gettysburg mark applause five times, then long-continued applause as he sits down.

   Lincoln at GettysburgThe world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
9. 20 November

   In two hours, in two minutes

   The next day Everett writes to the president. He admires the eloquent simplicity and appropriateness of Lincoln’s words and puts them above his own. Lincoln answers the same day from the Executive Mansion. In their respective parts, he writes, Everett could not have been excused to make a short address, nor he a long one. He is pleased the little he said was not entirely a failure.

   Edward Everett to Lincoln, 20 November 1863I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.