Posted on 02/12/2003 6:05:49 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
In the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, both sides, leaving fifty thousand dead or wounded or missing behind them, had reason to maintain a large pattern of pretense—Lee pretending that he was not taking back to the South a broken cause, Meade that he would not let the broken pieces fall through his fingers. It would have been hard to predict that Gettysburg, out of all this muddle, these missed chances, all the senseless deaths, would become a symbol of national purpose, pride, and ideals. Abraham Lincoln transformed the ugly reality into something rich and strange—and he did it with 272 words. The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration.
The residents of Gettysburg had little reason to be satisfied with the war machine that had churned up their lives. General George Gordon Meade may have pursued General Robert E. Lee in slow motion, but he wired headquarters that "I cannot delay to pick up the debris of the battlefield." That debris was mainly a matter of rot- ting horseflesh and manflesh—thousands of fermenting bodies, with gas-distended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat. For hygienic reasons, the five thousand horses and mules had to be consumed by fire, trading the smell of decaying flesh for that of burning flesh. Human bodies were scattered over, or (barely) under, the ground. Suffocating teams of Union soldiers, Confederate prisoners, and dragooned civilians slid the bodies beneath a minimal covering as fast as possible—crudely posting the names of the Union dead with sketchy information on boards, not stopping to figure out what units the Confed- erate bodies had belonged to. It was work to be done hugger-mugger or not at all, fighting clustered bluebottle flies black on the earth, shoveling and retching by turns.
The whole area of Gettysburg—a town of only twenty- five hundred inhabitants—was one makeshift burial ground, fetid and steaming. Andrew Curtin, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, was facing a difficult reelection campaign. He must placate local feeling, deal with other states diplomatically, and raise the funds to cope with corpses that could go on killing by means of fouled streams or contaminating exhumations.
Curtin made the thirty-two-year-old David Wills, a Gettysburg lawyer, his agent on the scene. Wills (who is no relation to the author) had studied law with Gettys- burg's most prominent former citizen, Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican now representing Lancaster in Congress. Wills was a civic leader, and he owned the largest house on the town square. He put an end to land speculation for the burial ground and formed an interstate commission to collect funds for the cleansing of Gettysburg's bloodied fields. The states were to be assessed according to their representation in Congress.
To charge them by the actual number of each state's dead would have been a time-consuming and complicated process, waiting on identification of each corpse, on the division of costs for those who could not be identified, and on the fixing of per-body rates for exhumation, identification, and reinterment.
Wills put up for bids the contract to rebury the bodies; out of thirty-four bids, the high one was eight dollars per corpse and the winning one was $1.59. The federal gov- ernment was asked to ship in the thousands of caskets needed, courtesy of the War Department. All other costs were handled by the interstate commission. Wills took title to seventeen acres for the new cemetery in the name of Pennsylvania. Wills meant to dedicate the ground that would hold the corpses even before they were moved.
He felt the need for artful words to sweeten the poisoned air of Gettysburg. He asked the principal wordsmiths of his time to join this effort—Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant. All three poets, each for his own reason, found their muse unbiddable. But Wills was not terribly disappointed. The normal purgative for such occasions was a large-scale, solemn act of orator, a kind of performance art that had great power over audiences in the middle of the nine- teenth century. Some later accounts would emphasize the length of the main speech at the Gettysburg dedication, as if that were an ordeal or an imposition on the audience. But a talk of several hours was customary and expected then—much like the length and pacing of a modern rock concert. The crowds that heard Lincoln debate Stephen Douglas in 1858, through three-hour engagements, were delighted to hear Daniel Webster and other orators of the day recite carefully composed paragraphs for two hours at the least.
The champion at such declamatory occasions, after the death of Daniel Webster, was Webster's friend Edward Everett. Everett was that rare thing, a scholar and an Ivy League diplomat who could hold mass audiences in thrall. His voice, diction, and gestures were successfully dramatic, and he habitually performed his well-crafted text, no matter how long, from memory. Everett was the inevitable choice for Wills, the indispensable component in the scheme for the cemetery's consecration. Battlefields were something of a specialty with Everett—he had augmented the fame of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill by his oratory at those Revolutionary- sites.
Simply to have him speak at Gettysburg would add this field to the sacred roll of names from the Founders' battles. Everett was invited, on September 23, to appear October 23. That would leave all of November for filling the graves, But a month was not sufficient lime for Everett to make his customary preparation for a major speech. He did careful research on the battles he was commemorating—a task made difficult in this case by the fact that official accounts of the engagement were just appearing. Everett would have to make his own inquiries. He could not be ready before November 19. Wills seized on that earliest moment, though it broke with the reburial schedule that had been laid out to follow on the October dedication. He decided to move up the reburial, beginning it in October and hoping to finish by November 19.
The careful negotiations with Everett form a contrast, more surprising to us than to contemporaries, with the casual invitation to President Lincoln, issued some time later as part of a general call for the federal Cabinet and other celebrities to join in what was essentially a ceremony of the participating states.
No insult was intended. Federal responsibility for or participation in state activities was not assumed then. And Lincoln took no offense. Though specifically invited to deliver only "a few appropriate remarks" to open the cemetery, he meant to use this opportunity. The partly mythical victory of Gettysburg was an element of his Ad- ministration's war propaganda. (There were, even then, few enough victories to boast of.) Beyond that, he was working to unite the rival Republican factions of Gover- nor Curtin and Simon Cameron, Edwin Stanton's prede- cessor as Secretary of War. He knew that most of the state governors would be attending or sending important aides —his own bodyguard, Ward Lamon, who was acting as chief marshal organizing the affair, would have alerted him to the scale the event had assumed, with a tremendous crowd expected. This was a classic situation for political fence-mending and intelligence-gathering. Lincoln would take with him aides who would circulate and bring back their findings.
Lamon himself had a cluster of friends in Pennsylvania politics, including some close to Gurtin, who had been infuriated when Lincoln overrode his opposition to Cameron's Cabinet appointment. Lincoln also knew the power of his rhetoric to define war aims. He was seeking occasions to use his words outside the normal round of proclamations and reports to Congress. His determination not only to be present but to speak is seen in the way he overrode staff scheduling for the trip to Gettysburg, Stanton had arranged for a 6:00 A.M. train to take him the hundred and twenty rail miles to the noontime affair. But Lincoln was familiar enough by now with military movement to appreciate what Clausewitz called "friction" in the disposal of forces—the margin for error that must always be built into planning, Lamon would have informed Lincoln about the potential for muddle on the nineteenth.
State delegations, civic organizations, military bands and units, were planning to come by train and road, bringing at least ten thousand people to a town with poor resources for feeding and sheltering crowds (especially if the weather turned bad). So Lincoln countermanded Stanton's plan:
I do not like this arrangement. I do not wish to so go that by the slightest accident we fail entirely, and, at the best, the whole to be a mere breathless running of the gauntlet. . . .
If Lincoln had not changed the schedule, he would very likely not have given his talk. Even on the day before, his trip to Gettysburg took six hours, with transfers in Baltimore and at Hanover Junction. Governor Curtin, starting from Harrisburg (thirty miles away) with six other governors as his guests, was embarrassed by breakdowns and delays that made them miss dinner at David Wills's house. They had gathered at 2:00 P.M., started at five, and arrived at eleven. Senator Alexander Ramsey, of Minnesota, was stranded, at 4:00 A.M. on the day of delivery, in Hanover Junction, with "no means of getting up to Gettysburg." Lincoln kept his resolution to leave a day early even when he realized that his wife was hysterical over one sons illness soon arcer tne aeatn oi anoiner s The President had imoortant business in Gettvsbure.
For a man so determined to get there, Lincoln seems—in familiar accounts—to have been rather cavalier about preparing what he would say in Gettysburg.
...The contrast with Everett's long labors of preparation is always implied. Research, learning, the student's lamp—none of these were needed by Lincoln, whose unsummoned muse was prompting him, a democratic muse unacquainted with the library. Lightning struck, and each of our informants (or their sources) was there when it struck.
The trouble with these accounts is that the lightning strikes too often, as if it could not get the work done on its first attempt It hits Lincoln on the train, in his room, at night, in the morning. If inspiration was treating him this way, he should have been short-circuited, not inspired, by the time he spoke. These mythical accounts are badly out of character for Lincoln, who composed his speeches thoughtfully. His law partner, William Herndon, having observed Lincoln's careful preparation of cases, recorded that he was a slow writer, who liked to sort out his points and tighten his logic and his phrasing. That is the process vouched for in every other case of Lincoln's memorable public state- ments.
It is impossible to imagine him leaving his Get- tysburg speech to the last moment He knew he would be busy on the train and at the site—important political guests were with him from his departure, and more joined him at Baltimore, full of talk about the war, elections, and policy. In Gettysburg he would be entertained at David Wills's house, with Everett and other important guests. State delegations would want a word with him. He hoped for a quick tour of the battle site (a hope fulfilled early on the nineteenth). He could not count on any time for the concentration he required when weighing his words.
In fact, at least two people testified that the speech was mainly composed in Washington, before Lincoln left for Gettysburg—though these reports, like all later ones describing this speech's composition, are themselves suspect. Lamon claimed that a day or two before the dedication Lincoln read him substantially the text that was delivered. But Lamon's remarks are notoriously imaginative, and he was busy in Gettysburg from November 13 to 16, He made a swift trip back to Washington on the sixteenth to collect his marshals and instruct them before departing again the next morning. His testimony here, as elsewhere, does not have much weight.
Noah Brooks, Lincoln's journalist friend, claimed that he talked with Lincoln on November 15, when Lincoln told him he had written his speech "over, two or three times"—but Brooks also said that Lincoln had with him galleys of Everett's speech, which had been set in type for later printing by the Boston Journal. In fact the Everelt speech was not set until November 14, and then by the Boston Daily Advertiser. It is unlikely that a copy could have reached Lincoln so early.
Lincoln's train arrived at dusk in Gettsburg.
There were still coffins stacked at the station for completing the reburials. Lamon, Wills, and Everett met Lincoln and escorted him the two blocks to the Wills home, where dinner was waiting, along with almost two dozen other distinguished guests. Lincoln's black servant, William Slade, took his luggage to the second-story room where he would stay that night, which looked out on the square. Everett was already in residence at the Wills house, and Governor Curtin's late arrival led Wills to suggest that the two men share a bed. The governor thought he could find another house to receive him, though lodgings were so overcrowded that Everett said in his diary that "the fear of having the Executive of Pennsylvania tum- bled in upon me kept me awake until one." Everett's daughter was sleeping with two other women, and the bed broke under their weight. William Saunders, the cemetery's designer, who would have an honored place on the platform the next day, could find no bed and had to sleep sitting up in a crowded parlor.
It is likely that Everett, who had the galleys of his speech with him, showed them to Lincoln that night. Noah Brooks, who mistook the time when Everett showed Lincoln his speech, probably gave the right reason—so that Lincoln would not be embarrassed by any inadvertent correspondences or unintended differences.
Lincoln greeted Curtin after his late arrival, and was otherwise interrupted during the night Bands and serenades were going through the crowded square under his window. One group asked him to speak, and the newspaper reported his words:
I appear before you, fellow-citizens, merely to thank vou for this cornpliment. The inference is a verv fair one that you would hear me for a little while at least, were I to commence to make a speech. I do not appear before you for the purpose of doing so, and for several substantial reasons. The most substantial of these is that I have no speech to make. [Laughter.] In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things. [A voice: If you can help it.] It very often happens that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all. [Laughter.] Believing that is my present condition this evening, I must beg of you to excuse me from ad- dressing you further.
This displays Lincoln's normal reluctance to improvise words as President. Lincoln's secretary John Hay, watching the scene from the crowd, noted in his diary:
"The President appeared at the door and said half a dozen words meaning nothing & went in."
Early in the morning Lincoln took a carriage ride to the battle sites. Later, Ward Lamon and his specially uniformed marshals assigned horses to the various dignitaries (carriages would have clogged the site too much). Although the march was less than a mile, Lamon had brought thirty horses into town, and Wills had supplied a hundred, to honor the officials present. Lincoln sat his horse gracefully (to the surprise of some), and looked meditative during the long wait while marshals tried to coax into line important people more concerned about their dignity than the President was about his. Lincoln was wearing a mourning band on his hat for his dead son. He also wore white gauntlets, which made his large hands on the reins dramatic by contrast with his otherwise black attire.
Everett had gone out earlier, by carriage, to prepare himself in the special tent he had asked for near the platform. At sixtynine, he had kidney trouble and needed to relieve himself just before and after the three-hour ceremony. (He had put his problem so delicately that his hosts did not realize that he meant to be left alone in the tent; but he finally coaxed them out.) Everett mounted the platform at the last moment, after most of the others had arrived.
Those on the raised platform were hermmed in close by standing crowds. When it had become clear that the numbers might approach twenty thousand, the platform had been set at some distance from the burial operations. Only a third of the expected bodies had been buried, and those under fresh mounds. Other graves had been readied for the bodies, which arrived in Irregular order (some from this state, some from that), making it impossible to complete one section at a time. The whole burial site was incomplete. Marshals tried to keep the milling thousands out of the work in progress.
Everett, as usual, had neatly placed his thick text on a little table before him—and then ostentatiously refused to look at it. He was able to indicate with gestures the sites of the battle's progress, visible from where he stood.
He excoriated the rebels for their atrocities, implicitly justifying the fact that some Confederate skeletons were still unburied, lying in the clefts of Devil's Den under rocks and autumn leaves. Two days earlier Everett had been shown around the field, and places were pointed out where the bodies lay. His speech, for good or ill, would pick its way through the carnage.
As a former Secretary of State, Everett had many sources, in and outside government, for the information he had gathered so diligently. Lincoln no doubt watched closely how the audience responded to passages that absolved Meade of blame for letting Lee escape. The setting of the battle in a larger logic of campaigns had an immediacy for those on the scene which we cannot recover. Everett's familiarity with the details was flattering to the local audience, which nonetheless had things co learn from this shapely presentation of the whole three days' action. This was like a moderm "docudrama" on television, telling the story of recent events on the basis of investigative reporting. We badly misread the evidence if we think Everett failed to work his customary magic. The best witnesses on the scene—Lincoln's personal secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, with their professional interest in good prose and good theater—praised Everett at the time and ever after.
He received more attention in their biography's chapter on Gettysburg than did their own boss.
When Lincoln rose, it was with a sheet or two, from which he read. Lincoln's three minutes would ever after be obsessively contrasted with Everett's two hours in accounts of this day. It is even claimed that Lincoln disconcerted the crowd with his abrupt performance, so that people did not know how to respond ("Was that all?").
Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg worked several revolutions, beginning with one in literary style. Everett's talk was given at the last point in history when such a performance could be appreciated without reservation. It was made obsolete within a half hour of the time when it was spoken. Lincoln's remarks anticipated the shift to vernacular rhythms which Mark Twain would complete twenty years later…
Lincoln was here to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution—not as William Lloyd Garrison had, by burning an instrument that countenanced slavery. He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment.
By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight of hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.
The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, the new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they had brought there with them. They walked off from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.
Some people, looking on from a distance, saw that a giant (if benign) swindle had been performed. The Chicago Times quoted the letter of the Constitution to Lincoln—noting its lack of reference to equality, its tolerance of slavery—and said that Lincoln was betraying the instrument he was on oath to defend, traducing the men who died for the letter of that fundamental law: It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dared he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges.
Heirs to this outrage still attack Lincoln for subverting the Constitution at Gettysburg—suicidally frank conservatives like M. E. Bradford and the late Willmoore Kendall. But most conservatives are understandably unwilling to challenge a statement now so hallowed, so literally sacrosanct, as Lincoln's clever assault on the constitutional past. They would rather hope or pretend, with some literary critics, that Lincoln's emotionally moving address had no discernible intellectual content that, in the words of the literary critic James Hurl, "the sequence of ideas is commonplace to the point of banality, the ordinary coin of funereal oratory.
People like Kendall and the Chicago Times editors might have wished this were true, but they knew better. They recognized the audacity of Lincoln's undertaking. Kendall rightly says that Lincoln undertook a new founding of the nation, to correct things felt to be imperfect in the Founders' own achievement: involving concretely a startling new interpretation of that principle of the founders which declares that "All men are created equal."
Edwin Meese and other "original intent" conservatives also want to go back before the Civil War amendments (particularly the Fourteenth) to the original Founders. Their job would be comparatively easy if they did not have to work against the values created by the Gettysburg Address. Its deceptively simple-sounding phrases appeal to Americans in ways that Lincoln had perfected in his debates over the Constitution during the 1850s. During that time Lincoln found the language, the imagery, the myths, that are given their best and briefest embodiment at Gettysburg. In order to penetrate the mystery of his "refounding," we must study all the elements of that stunning verbal coup....But, as Kendall himself admitted, the professors, textbooks, the politicians, the press, have overwhelmingly accepted Lincoln's vision. The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit—as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration."
For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as he did to correct the Constitution without overthrowing it.
It is this correction of the spirit, this intellectual revolution, that makes attempts to go back beyond Lincoln to some earlier version so feckless. The proponents of states' rights may have arguments to advance, but they have lost their force, in the courts as well as in the popular mind. By accepting the Gettysburg Address, and its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America.
And the "new thing" was a far worse Constitution, one that effectively tore out the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and instituted what none of the founders wanted, not even the centralizer and monarchist Hamilton. It created a unitary national government, with one lever of power ready to be manipulated by one party -- under two alternating names and one statist philosophy.
Dr. Wills knows very well that this was the case, and he approves of it. I say this with such confidence because I took a senior-level history seminar with him at Northwestern University, and it dealt with the ratification of the Constitution. He knows very well that the original compact was far different, and far more amenable to liberty, than what Lincoln constructed out of raw power and manipulation.
I differed with him, at times nearly violently in his group discussions, and pointed out how the "anti-Federalists" spoke truth to early seekers of power. Wills didn't agree with me, but he respected the coherence of his opponents -- and gave me an A.
Garry Wills is one of the most ideologically and rhetorically honest of the State-worshipers in our intellectual life. Yet, with his worship of Lincoln's oratory, and his disregarding of Lincoln's brutal practices, Wills nonetheless remains a thorough statist.
The states rights people cannot square the powers of the states with those same states' denial of the 1st, 2nd, and 5th amendment rights of the PEOPLE of their states. Ultimately, someone had to settle this dispute. Lincoln, though reluctant at every step of the way, did it.
He remains the second greatest president of all, after Washington. Like Reagan and Bush, he was constantly underestimated, viewed as a bumpkin. Yet he saw the inherent contradictions of slavery and the very admendments that the "states rights" advocates claimed protected them.
The real villains are the Calhouns, who tried to conceal a pro-slavery position with the intent of the constitution. Rather than dealing with the ESSENCE of the contradiction---that the 10th and (pick one, 5th) amendments cannot possibly be reconciled without "all men being equal"---he obfuscated and tried to make the issue federalism. This is what all the neo-confederates have fallen for ever since.
I don't like Wills, and he is wrong on most things. But that doesn't change the fact that the Founders KNEW they were screwing up by allowing any hint of slavery to stay in the constitution and that is why it was treated with "the silence" as Joseph Ellis called it in his "Founding Brothers."
As great as Jefferson, Madison, and the rest were, they failed to deal with the central issue of their time, pulling a Clinton and foisting it off on generations down the line. Now, would there have been a Union without their compromises? Hard to tell. But it certainly would have immediately painted the south as uninterested in LIBERTY and concerned only with PROPERTY RIGHTS IN HUMANS.
They cannot? Under the original scheme -- the first set of amendments being the condition for ratifying the Constitution in the first place -- there was no need to do so. Because the Constitution, as was made fully explicit by the 10th Amendment, only was to apply to the national government, all else being left to "the States respectively, or to the people." With, that is, only a few explicit exceptions to this general rule.
The individual states were perfectly free, as far as the national government was concerned, to not follow the same national Amendments, and to have a host of impositions from established churches to gun restrictions. With exceptions such as not being able to abrogate contracts, to wage war, or to stop interstate trade. In historical fact, few of the states imposed such burdens or deprived such rights, at least as expressed in law, and most modeled their state constitutions' bills of rights quite closely upon that of the national government.
Lincoln asserted a national purpose and central governmental supremacy, but had no means -- under the rule of law -- to impose either one. In fact, he at first bent over, to preserve appearances, in the other direction: He proposed, had Congress adopt, and sent to the states an original 13th Amendment in 1861 that would have forever barred the national government from prohibiting slavery in any state.
Unfortunately, he didn't choose to preserve appearances for very long, as the jailed opposition newspaper editors and forcibly dispelled Maryland and other state legislators soon found out at gunpoint.
The states that left the Union ultimately were made to ratify the 14th Amendment as a condition of readmission and of ending full military rule -- which made the 14th's badly worded and long-disputed "incorporating" of the other Amendments against the states questionable, since it was ratified under duress. Why would any state agree to effectively reverse the protection of its powers, except under the force of soldiers on its soil or intimidation in the national discourse?
Ultimately, someone had to settle this dispute. Lincoln, though reluctant at every step of the way, did it.
With what would have been, in today's proportionate terms, five million dead bodies in four years. With terrorizing and brutalizing of civilians, and the destruction of their means of survival. It's so easy to get over your "reluctance" to commit mass murder and centralizing of authority when others are doing it for you.
Ultimately, the Founders knew that there would be disagreements between the states over these issues, and whether they deliberately passed the torch to the Supreme Court, or whether John Marshall simply took it and the other branches did nothing about it, it was still "constitutional" because the system allowed it. Either way, the constitution has a contradiction that could only be solved by violence once the convention adjourned. Lincoln was a hero, and your confederate states-rights guys, merely people who dealt in human chattel. Dressing up a pig makes it no less of a pig.
Great stuff.
Walt
I think Wills is saying that Lincoln brought about a new way of -looking- at the basis of the whole country.
He wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855 about moving to a country where he could avoid the "base alloy of hypocrisy" of saying it was a free country, when it precluded equal rights for blacks, catholics or foreigners -- certainly not what the founders intended. Lincoln brought us back to the founding fathers ideals with that speech.
Walt
The "people" have preserved the Union. And the Congress is given the explicit power to provide for the general welfare and common defense. And the Constitution and --the laws-- are the supreme law of the land, including the Militia Act of 1792 and the Judiciary Act of 1789. The latter reads in part:
"And be it further enacted, That the Supreme Court shall have exclusive jurisdiction of all controversies of a civil nature, where a state is a party, except between a state and its citizens; and except also between a state and citizens of other states, or aliens, in which latter case it shall have original but not exclusive jurisdiction."
Now, was secession a civil matter or a criminal matter?
I'd say it was criminal as hell.
In any case, the 10th amendment never even comes into play.
Walt
I told you I'd keep thanking you.
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