“Four Score and Seven Years Ago…”
November 17, 1863, Evening
President Lincoln was annoyed and more than a little impatient with his cabinet members.
Pressed as he was with issues related to military affairs and with preparations for his address to Congress in early December, and fraught with worry about the health of his son, the commander in chief had expected a crisper response and more judicious planning for his upcoming visit to Pennsylvania.
In the last month alone, he had advised his Union generals on Robert E. Lee’s troop movements; urged another general to give up his congressional seat and focus his leadership skills on the battlefield; authorized testing of a new form of gunpowder; offered thoughts on how to deal with a state that was threatening to repudiate his Emancipation Proclamation; and ordered the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, to appoint a New Jersey colonel to lead a colored regiment.
In recent hours, the president’s ten-year-old son, Tad, had developed a rash and a high fever, and Lincoln, who had suffered the agonizing loss of his nine-year-old son Willie just a year earlier, feared that the deadly typhoid had struck again.
In the midst of these burdens, might he expect more from his senior advisers on this latest matter that had cropped up just two weeks earlier?
Abraham Lincoln had been invited to issue a “few appropriate remarks” at the upcoming dedication of a Union cemetery in just two days, and even at this late hour, final arrangements for his journey remained uncertain. He had expected to see his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, at the cabinet meeting earlier that day to confirm his own attendance at the dedication, but Chase had missed the meeting; he eventually declined the invitation to visit the cemetery.
Secretary Stanton had later outlined plans for the eighty-mile journey, suggesting that the train depart Washington at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of the event—November 19—arrive at its destination at noon, and then return home with Lincoln and his traveling party at 6:00 p.m., thereby making the trip “all in one day.” Lincoln, always prepared and meticulous in his planning, objected to Stanton’s plan. With his usual common sense and good judgment, he wrote to Stanton: “I do not like this arrangement. I do not wish to so go that by the slightest accident we fail [to arrive] entirely.”
* * *
LINCOLN HAD TAKEN IT upon himself earlier that evening to meet with the cemetery’s landscaper, William Saunders, who worked in the Department of Agriculture. The president had summoned Saunders to the executive mansion and asked him to bring the cemetery map and plans. Lincoln wanted to fully understand the physical features of the sacred ground he was visiting, not just its symbolic significance. Saunders arrived, spread the plans on Lincoln’s office table, and pointed out key landmarks and topographical locations. Saunders had explained that the careful way the graves were arranged was designed so that “the position of each [state] lot, and indeed of each interment, is relatively of equal importance.”
Lincoln knew that it was far more than the layout of graves that made these grounds different from an ordinary cemetery. The Union men who had died on this land had turned the tide of the war. Their efforts, along with the near-simultaneous surrender by the Confederates of Vicksburg in the western theater—both battles, incredibly, concluding on the Fourth of July, 1863—had shortly thereafter prompted Lincoln to conclude that “peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time.”
The plans that Lincoln and Saunders reviewed definitely differed from an ordinary cemetery.
They were looking at Gettysburg.
* * *
IN NOVEMBER 1863, GETTYSBURG had yet to be identified as the greatest Civil War campaign, an iconic turning point in the nation’s history. Yet Lincoln, and military commanders of both sides, recognized that Robert E. Lee’s ultimate retreat from the south-central Pennsylvania crossroads battlefield marked a crucial moment in the war. While the fighting would continue for nearly two more years, never again would the South come close to victory. “Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success,” Josiah Gorgas, a Confederate soldier, wrote in his diary three weeks after the battle. “Today … the Confederacy totters to its destruction.”
On both sides, the cost of Gettysburg was staggering—the more than 50,000 total casualties, 23,000 on the Union side, convey the scope of the epic battle but do not begin to describe the ghastliness of the suffering. Three horrific days of cannon fire and in-close fighting in the intense July heat had left the battlefields stained red with blood and littered with the broken, swollen, fermenting bodies of men and horses. More than 5,000 horses and mules were burned for hygienic reasons. Comrades of the dead, fighting swarms of bluebottle flies, tried in vain to bury the remains of their fellow soldiers; weeks after the battle more than 8,000 human corpses still lay scattered across Gettysburg’s fields, or under a thin coating of hastily turned ground, or barely covered in shallow trenches. Late in July, Gettysburg banker and civic leader David Wills wrote to Pennsylvania’s governor, Andrew Curtin: “In many instances arms and legs and sometimes heads protrude and my attention has been directed to several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them.”
Curtin asked Wills to take control of organizing the burials, and the banker did so with passion and great reverence. He convinced the federal government to ship thousands of coffins to Gettysburg, took title to seventeen acres for the new cemetery, and hired companies to rebury the bodies—whenever possible, to identify where the fallen had hailed from and arrange the graves according to states. He knew early in the process that he wanted to dedicate the ground where so many valiant men had fallen. In the words of one historian, Wills “felt the need for artful words to sweeten the poisoned air of Gettysburg.”
Wills turned to one of the country’s great orators, Edward Everett, to deliver the dedication. Everett had the reputation of mesmerizing audiences for lengthy periods, and the dedication of Gettysburg would require at least a two-hour speech to do the occasion justice. Everett agreed and said he needed time to research the battle and prepare his lengthy remarks. Wills agreed to hold the ceremony on November 19, a Thursday.
On November 2, Wills wrote to President Lincoln, inviting him to “participate in these ceremonies, which will doubtless be very imposing and solemnly impressive.” Lincoln needn’t concern himself with preparing any major speech, since, as Wills explained, the “Hon. Edward Everett will deliver the oration.” Wills’s desire was for Lincoln’s role to occur after Everett’s address, when, “as Chief Executive of the nation, [you] set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.”
Wills implored the president: “I hope you will feel it your duty to lay aside pressing business of the day to come here to perform this last sad rite to our brave soldiers dead.”
* * *
LINCOLN’S FRIEND AND SOON-TO-BE attorney general James Speed said years later in an interview that the president told him “the day before he left Washington he found time to write about half of his speech.” Likely, due to his preparation habits and attention to detail, Lincoln had formulated the remainder of the content in his mind before he arrived in Gettysburg. Lincoln’s secretary, John Nicolay, and many others have discounted the popular fiction that Lincoln wrote the address or even made notes on the journey between Washington and Gettysburg. Nicolay pointed out that the “rockings and joltings” of the train, as well as “ordinary courtesy” that required Lincoln to converse and mingle with staff and passengers would have made thoughtful writing impossible.
Lincoln would finish and reread his address once he arrived in Gettysburg. He knew he needed to strike a balance. He was well aware of the power of rhetoric to move people and of the import of words spoken by the president. Yet, he was not the featured speaker. He presumed Everett’s address would be lengthy, which meant that his needed to be both brief and inspirational, a challenging task.
The place to start, then, was the source from which he had often drawn his own inspiration and intellectual stimulation—from the founding fathers and the works they had created. “Let us revere the Declaration of Independence,” he once said, and on a different occasion: “Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices and policy which harmonize with it.”
What better themes were there to begin his remarks at the Gettysburg cemetery? His opening lines, written in Washington, looked back on the nation’s founding and all the qualities that the event represented. Stirring, eloquent, somberly lyrical and immensely powerful, Lincoln’s opening words would one day ring across the land and echo down through the decades:
“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 were created equal.”
* * *
ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS SEVENTEEN years old when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826; he was a young man in his late twenties when James Madison, the last of the founders, died. Yet the influence of these men on Lincoln was profound.
Perhaps because he had studied the founders and their philosophies, perhaps because he came of age during the resurgence of interest in America’s revolutionary generation—perhaps a combination of both—for virtually all of his political life, Lincoln relied on the strength and wisdom of the creators of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the ideas embodied in each document. He did so for the foundation that supported his philosophy, for the sustenance that fueled his politics, for the courage that helped him overcome personal and political adversity, and for the moral compass that guided his decision making. He drew on them for inspiration, for the rhetorical flourishes that became his trademark, for the intellectual depth that defined his greatness.
And for the biggest crisis he faced, he summoned the founders back to life and made them and their documents allies in his struggle to convince the nation of the need to end the scourge of slavery.
* * *
AS EARLY AS 1838, shortly after Madison’s death, Lincoln worried that the passing of the founding fathers would leave a void, and it was incumbent upon a new generation of Americans to carry on their legacy. “They were the pillars of liberty,” he said in a speech, “and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars.” Lincoln revered George Washington, admired Thomas Paine, and quoted scripture to emphasize his belief in the ideas of freedom and equality expressed by Jefferson in the Declaration (“an apple of gold,” Lincoln called it, citing Proverbs) and Madison and Morris in the Constitution (“the picture of silver” framed around the apple). From early boyhood, when he had read a popular biography of George Washington, Lincoln steeped himself in the history of the founders and in the philosophical roots of the nation’s creation. He had come to believe that the concept that “all men are created equal,” that they are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—was the “Father of all moral principal.” Indeed, these were “the definitions and axioms of a free society.”
During his career as a congressman and a lawyer, through the great slavery crises of the day—the Compromise of 1850, which imposed the strict Fugitive Slave Act; the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which introduced the notion of “popular sovereignty,” by which voters could decide whether a state would be slave or free; and southern secession—during the Civil War and throughout his presidency, Abraham Lincoln time and again sought guidance and clarity from the principles espoused in the founding documents. They were the documents that defined and unified a cause eighty years earlier. Lincoln was convinced that they could bring a nation together in the 1850s, and even after he was proven wrong and war commenced, he believed the principles in the Declaration and the Constitution could eventually help bind the country’s wounds.
* * *
LINCOLN WAS ON A pre-inaugural trip to Washington when he stopped in Philadelphia on February 22, 1861, George Washington’s birthday. Speaking at Independence Hall, Lincoln found himself “filled with deep emotion” standing in the place where “collected together [were] the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live.” Any chance he had to restore peace to a “distracted country” would come from the wisdom and inspiration of the founders. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he told his audience, which responded with great cheers. “I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and adopted that [document].”
Lincoln said he had often asked himself what great principle had kept the Union together for more than eighty years. “It was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time,” he said to thunderous applause. The fundamental and unshakeable promise of the Declaration was that “in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”
As his speech concluded, Lincoln wondered whether the country could be saved upon the principle of “equal chance.” If so, “I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it.” If not, “it will be truly awful.”
For him, the principle was worth fighting and dying for. Lincoln admitted that if the country could not be saved without giving up the principle of “equal chance,” was it a country worth saving at all? In a prophetically chilling declaration to the audience, he proclaimed his dedication to this core principle:
“I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”
* * *
TO LINCOLN, SAVING the Union was the nation’s only option to preserve the fundamental principles of liberty, self-government, and equal opportunity. A shattered America would demonstrate to the whole world that the great experiment had failed, that a constitutional republic was unworkable.
Which people in what country would have the courage to ever try such a gamble again?
Further, the establishment of a separate slaveholding Confederacy would violate the essential equality theme woven through the Declaration and the Constitution. “This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States,” said Abraham Lincoln. “It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy … can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity.” The government of the United States was created to “elevate the condition of men … to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life.” For that reason, more than any other, the Union must be preserved.
For Lincoln, the Declaration and the Constitution were inseparable; the first the end and the second the means. The Declaration embodied the principle of liberty for all; the Constitution was the set of laws to make it so, the document that “framed” the government according to the principles of the Declaration. In his metaphor of the apple and the frame, Lincoln pointed out that the “picture”—the Constitution—“was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.” The ideas enshrined in the Declaration served as the guideposts for the framers of the Constitution, but both documents were required for the nation to flourish. “So let us act that neither the picture [n]or apple shall ever be blurred or bruised or broken,” Lincoln wrote.
Nor was Lincoln deterred from his admiration of the founders—whom he called “the wisest and best men in the world”—because of the fact that most were slave owners. He understood the inconsistency, in some cases was deeply troubled by it and in others offered little more than excuses, but he recognized also that the founders and framers were in many ways bound by their time and place in history. Many had expressed their hostility to slavery, but most recognized that vigorous attempts to abolish it amidst the debates over the Declaration and the Constitution would have jeopardized both documents and the formation of the new nation. Their declarations of equality and liberty, in and of themselves, had begun the process of slavery’s extinction, Lincoln believed, and for that, the founders had demonstrated courage and vision.
He insisted over and over again that, in a new century, the “all men are created equal” clause in the Declaration applied to blacks, that the founders would have agreed “that there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He also argued that the absence of the word “slave” or “slavery” from the Constitution was evidence both of the framers’ embarrassment by it and their reluctance to tackle it head-on lest the entire document—and country—disintegrate. “The thing is hid away in the constitution,” Lincoln said, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.”
Symbolically at least, Lincoln had begun the process of excising the cancer when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of 1863. On July 7, after Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln had spontaneously addressed a throng of thousands that had gathered outside the White House, and again had referenced the glorious place July 4 had in American history. Indeed, he said referring to Gettysburg, the “great battle” was fought on the “first, second, and third of July.” Was it just coincidence that “on the fourth the enemies of the Declaration that all men are created equal had to turn tail and run?”
There was little doubt that the tide of the war had shifted to the North’s advantage. There would be more fighting, to be sure, but Lincoln and the Army of the Potomac were that much closer to removing the cancer of slavery and preserving the Union that the founders had established.
Victory was far from assured, and perhaps a compromise would be required to finally end the bloodshed, but now, in November 1863, Lincoln’s fervent hope was that the nation had stared into the abyss and would survive; that it had faced an epic challenge and, battered and bruised as it was, would endure.
* * *
AS IT TURNED OUT, Lincoln’s order to depart for Gettysburg the day before the commemoration was the right decision.
No particular mishap or delay occurred, but the special train from Washington did not chug into the station until nightfall. Coffins were stacked nearby awaiting burial. David Wills had invited Lincoln, along with Governor Curtin and Edward Everett, to dine and board at his home. “The hotels in our town will be crowded and in confusion,” Will had predicted, and he was correct. From far and wide, people came, as if on a pilgrimage. “Except during its days of battle the little town of Gettysburg had never been so full of people,” John Nicolay recalled. “After the usual supper hour the streets literally swarmed with visitors.” Indeed, streets throughout Gettysburg were clogged, one newspaper reporter wrote, as “citizens from every quarter … in every kind of vehicle—old Pennsylvania wagons, spring wagons, carts, family carriages, buggies, and more fashionable modern vehicles, all crowded with citizens—kept pouring into the town in one continual string.” The crowds were joined by regimental bands and soon people broke into celebratory song.
It is likely that Edward Everett showed Lincoln the galleys of his address, which he had with him, that night in Wills’s home. Everett often previewed his written orations with friends and acquaintances to hear their opinions, and it would have been a breach of protocol for Everett not to share his remarks with the chief executive who would follow him to the rostrum. Did Everett’s speech influence or even inspire Lincoln as he pondered the remainder of his own talk? The president’s speech was still only half-written and Lincoln was tired after his long trip and dinner with Wills and his companions.
Perhaps he made a few revisions on the portion of the address he had completed, but he went to bed soon after ten o’clock. He would finish his remarks and recopy them in the morning. Whether Everett’s speech helped Lincoln fill in the edges of his own oration is unknown, but this much is clear: the president had been thinking about the major themes for virtually his entire life.