The Long Shadow of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

1. The Final Resting Place: The Creation and Dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery

6 1 The Final Resting Place: The Creation and Dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery It is the desire that, after the Oration, You as Chief Executive of the Nation formally set apart these grounds to their Sacred use by a few appropriate remarks. —David Wills to Abraham Lincoln, November 2, 1863 Three days of intense conflict, July 1–3, 1863, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania , left the borough with a butcher’s toll of fifty-one thousand casualties, including an estimated seven thousand dead humans and five thousand horses. Put another way, six million pounds of flesh lay on once peaceful farm fields. The horses were burned; most of the humans were buried by Union soldiers where they fell. The Confederates remained in their graves until the soldiers were moved to southern burial grounds in the early 1870s. Approximately fifteen hundred of the Union deceased were recovered and returned home, but the high cost of embalming and shipping bodies meant 70 percent of the Union dead remained in Gettysburg.1 At the end of July 1863, local lawyer David Wills described, “Our dead are lying on the fields unburied (that is no grave being dug), with small portions of earth dug up alongside of the body and thrown over it. In many instance arms and legs, and sometimes heads, protrude, and my attention has been directed to several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them.”2 When Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin visited Gettysburg just days after the battle, he asked Wills to act as his local agent and to ensure the proper care for the state’s fallen heroes. Thus began the process that brought Abraham Lincoln to Gettysburg four months later (see fig. 1.1). The Final Resting Place 7 Figure 1.1. Abraham Lincoln, Sunday, November 8, 1863. Photograph by Alexander Gardner. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. This chapter details the development of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery , but more important, it explores the fundamental question of why Lincoln went to Gettysburg, what message he tried to convey, and what factors ensured that his vision would be largely rebuffed in 1863. In the middle of a war whose direction consumed every possible moment of his time, Lincoln took nearly two days to travel to Gettysburg so that he could speak for fewer than three minutes. The Emancipation Proclamation , signed on January 1, 1863, had dealt slavery a blow but only a half blow, for it made no mention of equality and was written in such a pragmatic and legalistic tone that historian Richard Hofstadter once commented it had “all the moral grandeur of bill of lading.”3 Lincoln clearly wanted to go further, telling Congress in December 1862, “We The Final Resting Place 8 know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.”4 Nearly a year later, many had not accepted Lincoln’s vision, and, consequently, he intended the Gettysburg Address as his most eloquent statement that a democracy could only persist with equality at its core. Lincoln was not the only speaker at Gettysburg, however, and to understand the immediate reactions to his speech (outlined in chapter 2), one must know not only his intent but also what the other orators said. The job facing Wills was unimaginable in scope but would prove himself up to the task. An 1851 graduate of Pennsylvania College, Wills went on to study law under the abolitionist Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and gained admission to the bar in 1854. That same year, Wills became the first superintendent of the Adams County Public Schools, showing his prominence in the community. As befitted a Stevens protégé, Wills was a pro-abolition Republican. It was not surprising when the politically like-minded Governor Curtin appointed Wills his local agent just a week after the battle.5 Until at least July 20, no plan existed to create a cemetery for the soldiers in Gettysburg. In those first few weeks, Wills attempted to locate and identify the remains of Pennsylvanians and return them to their families. Theodore Dimon, New York’s agent in charge of taking care of the state’s deceased soldiers at Gettysburg, claimed a...