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Conclusion: Who Wrote the Gettysburg Address?
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235 Conclusion: Who Wrote the Gettysburg Address? Away in Massachusetts the day after the Gettysburg ceremony, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was catching up on some correspondence, thanking an old friend for having written a “very generous, and more than generous ” article about him in the most recent edition of the Atlantic. Longfellow’s reputation and popularity were at their peak, but the war years had been personally harrowing. His beloved wife had died in a fire in the early months of the war, and then in the summer of 1863 his son Charles, who had inspired Longfellow’s touching poem “To a Child” and was just seventeen, had run off to join the army in spite of opposition from his father, who thought the lad too young. Just the week before, Longfellow had been shaken from sleep by a “thunderous knock on the front door,” which he answered in fear of news from some far-off battlefield announcing his son’s death. Many across the Union, and across the once and future nation, lived with the same fear in that fall of 1863, or had already received the telegram in the night. But this time it was a false alarm, so Longfellow could tell his friend, “We are all well here in this old house” and relate his happiness that their mutual friends, the scholar Charles Eliot Norton and the poet James Russell Lowell, had been named editors at the North American Review. Another bit of news, about the cemetery dedication at Gettysburg, also caught Longfellow’s attention that November morning. He had declined writing a poem for the occasion when David Wills was seeking a poet for the ceremony, and so he was perhaps particularly interested in reading about the event. It was not Everett’s oration that caught his eye, however; Longfellow did not even mention it. Instead he noticed a relatively small item that was almost buried amid the extensive coverage devoted to the event by all the Boston newspapers and that, in some ways, must have spoken to his own fears of the sacrifices demanded by the war: “This morning ’s paper brings the report of Lincoln’s brief speech at Gettysburg,” wrote America’s most esteemed poet, “which seems to me admirable.”1 Longfellow’s admiring friend, and the recipient of Longfellow’s letter admiring “Lincoln’s brief speech at Gettysburg,” turns out to have been George W. Curtis. Critic and author, one-time denizen of the transcendentalist experiment at Brook Farm and the current political editor of Harper’s Weekly, Curtis was one of the most influential figures in the interlinked and ingrown worlds of midcentury American literary, political, and cultural life. Whatever the role of Longfellow’s recommendation, in his next Harper’s Weekly column Curtis repeated the already standard comment that Everett’s oration was “smooth and cold” but went on to glowingly praise Lincoln’s speech—and there should be no doubt which passage he particularly commended: “The few words of the President were from the heart to the heart,” he wrote. “They can not be read, even, without kindling emotion. ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’ It was as simple and felicitous and earnest a word as was ever spoken.” For good measure, the New Year’s editorial in Harper’s Weekly the next month again cited the same passage. In April 1864, the magazine went so far as to call Lincoln’s speech “the most perfect piece of American eloquence” and, at a time when the classical era still represented the highest achievement of art and thought, to assert that it was “as noble and pathetic and appropriate as the oration of Pericles over the Peloponnesian dead.”2 Opponents inadvertently underscored the high praise by asserting that Lincoln could not have possibly written the speech, leading the White House to officially announce in April 1864 that, with a few exceptions, the president personally wrote everything published over his name.3 Not to be outdone in honoring the speech, Longfellow’s and Curtis’s friends Norton and Lowell at the North American Review, a periodical with a small circulation but wide influence, on the anniversary of the battle in July 1864 seconded the Philadelphia Press and anointed Lincoln’s speech with the 236 conclusion [44.202.198.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:31 GMT) description that generations would take almost as part of its...