Writing the Gettysburg Address: Writing the Gettysburg Address

6. The Battlefield Draft

s i x The Battlefield Draft People were up early in Gettysburg on November 19, and many had slept little, if at all, resting fitfully on church pews or tramping about the streets to stay warm, singing “John Brown’s Body” and waiting for day to break. Down the same roads that four months before had brought 150,000 men in arms there came the crowds, and all day long more arrived by train and cart and horse and foot. Scattered in houses and hotels across the town, a dozen governors and some of the highest officers of the U.S. government prepared themselves, and on the street that ran past the front door of David Wills, soldiers and citizens assembled for the procession to the cemetery . Liberty Hollinger, who had just turned seventeen, was among those who had come out to see the dignitaries and join the festivities on the town square adjacent to the Wills house, “where all was excitement,” she later recalled, “and everybody was having such a jolly time.” From their vantage point she and her friends could distinctly see Abraham Lincoln up in a second-floor room of the Wills house repeatedly coming to the window and then “pacing back and forth” as though “engaged in deep thought.”1 Through her cherished memory of a day in her youth sixty years before, we can almost stand with young Liberty and her friends amid the excited crowd before the Wills house, with messengers and horses and soldiers and townspeople surging across the Diamond, Odd Fellows in regalia, wounded and mutilated veterans forming the proud honor guard, the pa143 rade marshals draped in white sashes, and all the participants trying to find their places in the grand procession. Then Liberty (a Hollywood scriptwriter would blush to have invented such a name for such a moment) looked up at the window of the Wills house and saw—on the very morning on which Abraham Lincoln gave a speech that resolved to rededicate the nation to a “new birth of freedom”—that he held “a piece of yellow paper about the size and appearance of an ordinary envelope.”2 The paper Liberty Hollinger saw, which we can take to be the delivery text of the Gettysburg Address, should have been the speech that Curtin saw Lincoln copying the night before. But here is where the compositional story Lincoln told to James Speed truly runs off the rails, for instead of using the text he had written the night before, on the morning of the ceremony itself Lincoln returned again to revising his “few appropriate remarks.” By this time, Lincoln had been hoping for about two weeks to be there, participating with others in the “interesting ceremony” of commemoration and national mourning. He had prepared remarkably thoroughly since encouraging Lamon to accept the duties of marshal, talking with his cabinet, arranging train schedules with his secretary of war, inviting seemingly everyone he met, summoning the cemetery designer to speak with him, writing a draft in Washington, then in Gettysburg speaking with David Wills before settling down for about an hour to review or revise his remarks. Aside from uncertainty about whether Lincoln would be able to attend the event, which explains the initial confusion over the train schedule , the first sign of disorder, or at least of spontaneity, in the composition process was the improvised visit to Seward the night before. Even so, the matter was handled relatively quickly, and Lincoln had returned to the Wills house and set about finishing his text, “copying” it, according to Curtin. The speech was completed, and the morning visit to the battlefield awaited. Then something happened, for the speech Lincoln wrote out the previous night was not the speech he took to the stand; it was not what would come to be called “the Gettysburg Address.” There was still more to the compositional drama Lincoln narrated to his old friend. “He took what he had written with him to Gettysburg, then he was put in an upper room in a house, and he asked to be left alone for a time. He then prepared a speech,” Lincoln had told Speed. So far, so good, and the record matches each step precisely. Then comes trouble: “but concluded it so shortly before it was to be delivered he had not time to memorize it.” Lincoln re144 chapter six membered the compositional process as...