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o n e “It Will Be an Interesting Ceremony” Abraham Lincoln was irritated. It was Tuesday, November 17, 1863, the usual day the cabinet met, but his secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase, had not shown up, nor had he sent an explanation. “I expected to see you here at [the] Cabinet meeting,” Lincoln wrote in rebuke, the missing definite article nicely expressing his hasty chagrin, for there was pressing business . Lincoln had finally decided just two or three days before that he would be able to attend the dedication ceremony of the Gettysburg cemetery on November 19 for the honored dead of the Union’s greatest victory, but he was also in the midst of writing an Annual Message that would at last present his formal plan for Reconstruction to Congress; a major battle was looming at Chattanooga, Tennessee, to seize the vital rail route to Atlanta ; little Tad Lincoln was worrisomely ill; and on top of all the cares of the presidency in wartime, the railroad schedule for going to Gettysburg that had been given to him that morning had not been to his liking and had to be redone. So when Chase had not come to the meeting, Lincoln felt compelled in his note to let him know that he was displeased—“I expected to see you here at Cabinet meeting”—before getting to the matter at hand: “and to say something about going to Gettysburg. There will be a train to take and return us. The time for starting is not yet fixed; but when it shall be, I will notify you.”1 The uncertainty about the train schedule reflected in Lincoln’s imperi10 11 “It Will Be an Interesting Ceremony” ous note to Chase was of Lincoln’s own making, for he had waited until the last possible moment to decide about the Gettysburg trip, creating confusion in the press, at the White House, and in the administration more generally about the travel arrangements. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had queried the railroads about a travel schedule, probably on Monday the sixteenth, and, acting under the assumption that “economy of time” was essential, they responded with an itinerary that had the presidential party departing Washington, D.C., on Thursday, the day of the ceremony, at 6:00 a.m. and returning that same day by midnight. Stanton had reason to believe that Lincoln particularly wanted to visit the battlefield, and he assured Lincoln that the train would arrive in Gettysburg by noon, “thus giving two hours to view the ground before the dedication ceremonies commence.”2 Some of the newspaper reports datelined Washington, November 16, that first reported Lincoln’s decision to attend the ceremony included this one-day schedule, but on the morning of the seventeenth Lincoln wrote to Stanton, “I do not like this arrangement. I do not wish to so go that by the slightest accident we fail entirely, and, at the best, the whole to be a mere breathless running of the gauntlet.”3 It was not only Chase who was receiving marks of presidential disfavor that day. Probably Lincoln had heard about the difficult rail journey to Gettysburg from his friend Ward Hill Lamon, who was serving as the master of ceremonies at the dedication , for Lamon had returned a few days before from a trip to Gettysburg and the two men had several times conferred about the ceremony.4 In any case, economy of time for Lincoln was not the highest priority: he wanted to be sure that he arrived in time for what he was to call the “interesting ceremony.” Without a travel schedule, Lincoln could not announce a departure time, or even a date, at the midday cabinet meeting as he had hoped. Because Lincoln wished to bring some or all of his cabinet with him, late into Tuesday afternoon the office of Secretary of State William Seward still did not know whether he, Lincoln, and the others in the official party would be conducting business as usual in Washington on Wednesday or traveling to Gettysburg.5 At some point on that busy Tuesday, Stanton and Lincoln finally arrived at a schedule more to the president’s liking that had Lincoln leaving Washington at noon on the eighteenth, the day before the ceremony, and returning just after the ceremony on the evening of the nineteenth.6 The New York Express and other papers reported that this [13.59.218.147] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 13:59...

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