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10 Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening All of our roads lead to Gettysburg. Tragedy and eloquence draw us back to that special place, that crossroads town, and much of what it means to be an American seems to intersect there. We are drawn back by the distant call of trumpets and by the echoes of noble purpose. It is where our greatest gods of war clashed for three days and decided the nation’s fate; it is where our most revered president set forth both the promise and the hope of the nation’s future. Gettysburg is by any measure America’s most hallowed ground. But while we are repeatedly drawn back to those broad fields and rolling hills and to the story they have to tell, and no matter how often we may try to satisfy our longing to understand the meaning of Gettysburg, we are left mostly listening to those distant trumpets and far-off echoes, and we are never quite sure why we should feel an almost spiritual attachment to the bloody battle that was fought there and to the rather spare words that were spoken there. One reason for that spiritual attachment is obvious. The fierce fighting that occurred at Gettysburg for three days in July 1863, when the Union Army of the Potomac collided with the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, resulted in more than fifty-one thousand casualties. The soldiers who died there gave the ultimate sacrifice of their lives, the “last full measure of devotion”as Lincoln aptly called it, and it is difficult not to see that act of sacrifice as something precious, something holy, something grandly divine. Thousands of lives were lost on every battlefield in that great and terrible war, and yet Gettysburg resonates with the deepest spiritual connections , hearkening the soul back to the bowers, forging a tangible link with the past that can, for many people, be felt and not just seen. Gettysburg , wrote Bruce Catton, “was, and is, preeminently the great American symbol, and it is not to be touched lightly. It has overtones.”1 Overtones,indeed.Some of those overtones,the blaring ones that sound like the horns of archangels and that compel us to think of Gettysburg as sacred soil, come from the solemn words that Abraham Lincoln spoke at Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening 161 the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery on November 19, 1863. If it is any wonder that we think of Gettysburg in a spiritual way, it should not be, because it was Lincoln himself who set such thinking in motion. It is fairly commonplace for scholars to point out that the words and phrases Lincoln used in the Gettysburg Address tend, to a great extent, to be religiously charged. One recent historian has even suggested that it was “divine help” that told Lincoln “how to communicate to the people assembling at Gettysburg.”2 Whether or not such a thunderclap of heavenly intervention can ever be proved or even safely assumed, numerous scholars have, nevertheless, noted the plentiful passages in Lincoln’s address that seem to have been borrowed from the Scriptures. Even though Lincoln said that it was beyond our poor power to consecrate the ground of Gettysburg, that is precisely what his speech achieved. Emory M. Thomas has ruefully observed that the “sacred acres” of Gettysburg “have endured an absolutely harrowing degree of hallowing.”3 If we take a closer look at the Gettysburg Address, if we follow the roads that lead us back to Lincoln’s supreme moment, we may begin to see that some of the blame for Gettysburg’s spiritual aura belongs to Abraham Lincoln and the words he chose for his immortal speech. To begin with, there is the famous opening phrase of the address,“Fourscore and seven years ago,” a fairly ornate method of rendering a particular historical date that Lincoln could have picked up anywhere, but that must have come from his ready command of the Bible and from chapter and verse, in this case from the “threescore years and ten” and the “fourscore years” found in Psalms 90:10. Lincoln’s reference to “our fathers” in the first sentence is mindful of the Lord’s Prayer. It is also possible that behind Lincoln’s clarion call for a “new birth of freedom” was the idea of rebirth set forth in John 3:3–7. Apart from those specific citations, however, it is difficult to pin down the sources of Lincoln’s...

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