November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg

November 21: The World Will Little Note (Futility)

[ ∞π∞ ] n o v e m b e r 2 1 The World Will Little Note (Futility) —O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth’s sleep at all? —Wilfred Owen, ‘‘Futility’’ With a little work and thinking, a person should be able to figure out whether the Milwaukee man, Selleck, was right about where Abraham Lincoln stood when he spoke the Gettysburg Address. All that is needed are a few fresh ideas, clear logic, and the fortitude to look at things as they really were. Professional historians have understandable limitations. The Park Historian, sadly, probably has an agenda, a desire to make a name by destroying old, accepted interpretations. Of course I cannot say for sure because I have never met her. Called a couple of times to try to make appointments, called to try to arrange a walk-through of the sites. She was busy. Meetings. But she could meet Garry Wills, famous author of Lincoln at Gettysburg . All right. I know I’m nobody in particular. Just a guy. Before going to Evergreen Cemetery, however, a little spadework needs to be done. First, a little hunt through the Park Service’s files so I will know what I am looking at when I get to the cemetery. Most people don’t know about these files. ‘‘Nothing in particular,’’ I say to the librarian. ‘‘Just want to browse through the files. Kind of interested in the cemeteries.’’ I do not want them n o v e m b e r 2 1 [ ∞π≤ ] to know what I’m up to. These are Park Service people, remember. Very fine people. Know a lot. Very helpful. I respect them. But I’m here to explode a theory concocted by one of their people. I need to maintain a low profile. Sitting at a tiny table next to the file cabinet at the end of a wing of the Gettysburg Cyclorama Center, I look through a manila file containing pages of unpublished letters, sheet after sheet of clippings. Here is one pertaining to D. H. Buehler and E. G. Fahnestock, two of Gettysburg’s leading citizens. (The Fahnestock Building stands near the town square.) The two wrote this letter to Pennsylvania’s Governor Curtin not long after the battle in 1863. It seems there was another battle going on. There is going to be a cemetery, but who will be in charge and where will it be? Will it be made in Evergreen Cemetery, owned by Mr. David McConaughy, or in a new place, next to Evergreen, as proposed by Mr. Wills? ‘‘The main di≈culty’’ with getting the cemetery established, wrote the two, lay in the ‘‘peculiar relations subsisting between them’’—between McConaughy and Wills. Apparently David Wills and the president of the Evergreen Cemetery Association distrusted, perhaps hated, each other. Each wants the cemetery; each wants to deal the other man out. McConaughy lost the cemetery competition. He saw Wills as an entrepreneur. Wills saw McConaughy, who wanted to buy parts of the battlefield to preserve them, as a developer. Here is a letter from Wills to Governor Curtin, written March 21, 1864, after the cemetery dispute was over. The bad feelings have not dissipated. It is impractical, Wills says, to have the battlefield preserved by a developer (McConaughy). After all, the fence rails the soldiers used for breastworks have already been dug out by the farmers. The preservation scheme is ‘‘visionary and impractical and in fact entirely useless.’’ McConaughy has proposed it for a ‘‘selfish & mercenary purpose,’’ despite its fine-sounding name: ‘‘Gettysburg Battle Field Memorial Association.’’ Bad blood. How likely would it have been, as Frank Klement points out, that Wills would have stood for the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery being made in McConaughy’s cemetery? But here is something else. A letter from Wills to the governor of Delaware before the cemetery was designed. He says he was ‘‘decidedly of the opinion that we should entirely ignore State lines or the appearance of division of States in this sacred project, and bury all together in these grounds as they fell.’’ (Of course most of them fell by state, in their regiments .) It is an entirely fitting and proper idea, though perhaps less interesting to posterity, and making it harder to find individual soldiers. Although Wills won on the cemetery location, he lost on this issue. Perhaps t h e...