Writing the Gettysburg Address: Writing the Gettysburg Address

4. Revisions in Gettysburg

f o u r Revisions in Gettysburg “The wind high and the weather threatening today,” Edward Everett wrote in his diary for November 18, so he kept to his room in the Wills house, “gathering my forces for tomorrow.” Still, the seventy-year-old went down to the Gettysburg station to greet the president and introduce him to David Wills. It was a characteristically polite and formal gesture by Everett, whose puritan austerity, which many mistook for lack of feeling, is suggested by his diary entry that “Mrs. Wise was in the party” accompanying the president; Mrs. Wise was his daughter. An “immense crowd” had gathered at the station, among them John Russell Young, a reporter with Forney ’s Philadelphia Press, who witnessed at around six in the evening a “straggled, hungry set” descend one by one to the platform at the station, preserved today as a museum in honor of the day Lincoln came to town. First came Forney, “in the flush of his winning manhood,” who Young thought considered himself the host of this affair in his home state; “Lincoln , with that weary smile”; Seward wearing “an essentially bad hat”; John Hay, “handsome as a peach, the countenance of extreme youth,” in attendance upon the president, and the rest. So great was the crush of the crowd that, according to Everett, “the president [was] extracted from the good natured pressure, with some difficulty.”1 The crowd followed as Lincoln traveled by carriage the few blocks to the Wills home, the scene of Lincoln’s written revisions while in Gettys88 burg. As Hay wrote in his diary, upon arrival the party “broke like a drop of quicksilver spilt.” Lincoln joined Everett to be among the thirty-eight people (by Everett’s count) who lodged at the Wills house, while Hay, Nicolay, the diplomats, Secretary Seward, and Postmaster General Blair went to stay at the adjacent home of Robert Harper, longtime editor of one of Gettysburg’s Republican papers. Typically, no one mentioned Usher’s whereabouts. Others went to one of the hotels or stayed with various residents .2 The town was already nearly filled to capacity with guests, many of whom must have shared the sentiments of Josephine Roedel, who wrote, “Never in my life will I have the same opportunity of seeing so many of the great men of the nation.” For the most part the early evening in the town was relatively quiet as people perused the tables of relics for sale that dotted the sidewalks, found dinner and warmth by a fire, or sought accommodations in the private homes, churches, schools, and businesses that had been thrown open to receive them. After the clouds blew through, it turned into a beautiful, clear, and chilly November night, shimmering under a bright three-quarter moon. “Every house groaned with the good things of this life prepared to feed the coming crowd,” a Gettysburger wrote, although some visitors grumbled that the prices charged were a bit steep.3 Probably fairly soon after arrival, Lincoln and the Washington dignitaries ate dinner at the Wills house, prepared by a very pregnant Catherine Wills, who would be delivered of a healthy girl, Jennie, just a month later. Decades later, Jennie spoke of a “family dinner” with Lincoln the night before the ceremony, but our only glimpse of the scene comes a year later in the aftermath of the 1864 presidential election season, during which not just Democrats had parodied Lincoln as a bloodthirsty boor.4 Defending Lincoln’s manners, Everett told a formal banquet attended by the cream of Boston society that he had dined at the home of “my friend, David Wills,” surrounded by a grand company of ambassadors, officers, and diplomats, and he said of Lincoln, “In gentlemanly appearance, manners and conversation , he was the peer of any man at the table.”5 Lincoln then spent at least an hour or two greeting and talking with the guests and visitors at the Wills house. Among the many guests whom Lincoln met that evening was a local soldier, William McIlhenny, with both his sister and his fiancée, who probably owed this special introduction to the fact that he had recently been shot through the shoulder in a skirmish around Winchester, Virginia, about 80 miles to the south. “I had my right 89 Revisions in Gettysburg hand in a sling at the time, and of course, had to give...