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3. A Prophet with a Vision: 1901–22
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72 3 A Prophet with a Vision: 1901–22 The gaze of the younger persons of the audience fastened on those silver heads and furrowed features, listening to the reminiscences of participants in the older scenes, enabled them without the aid of much imagination to consider themselves a part of, and witnesses to, the soul-stirring scene of fifty years ago. —Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, November 26, 1913 On July 4, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson addressed a crowd of veterans and spectators at Gettysburg. Marking the fifty years that had passed since the battle, the native Virginian commented, “How wholesome and healing the peace has been! We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except that we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other’s eyes.”1 But not everyone saw the past half century and current situation through such rose-colored glasses. Some Union veterans were upset by Wilson’s comments, feeling he had whitewashed the traitorous history of secession and rendered soldiers on both sides equally heroic. More pointed, the following day the Baltimore Afro-American Ledger wondered “whether Mr. Lincoln had the slightest idea in his mind that the time would ever come when the people of this country would come to the conclusion that by the ‘People’ he meant only white people.”2 The period from 1901 to 1922 is best described as an era of sectional reunification and marked the first time the Gettysburg Address was really put to work, so to speak, in a systematic way toward a specific cause. A process that began with the ouster of North Carolina’s George H. White from Congress, the last Southern African American to serve in that body until 1973, came to fruition with the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. A Prophet with a Vision 73 As the Civil War generation began passing away in large numbers and the need for national unity intensified in the internationally focused twentieth century, leaders on both sides worked toward reunification if not complete reconciliation. Historian Barbara Gannon concludes, “It was not the [veterans] who conceded; instead it was their children and grandchildren who accepted the fundamental tenets of the Lost Cause to advance their own cause—reunion and reconciliation.” At times, reunification and reconciliation were vastly different aims; at others, they nearly aligned. Sectional reunification required turning a blind eye to the rollback of rights for Southern black people.3 Representative White’s ouster was emblematic of a larger disenfranchisement of black voters: In Louisiana, for example, the number of registered African American voters declined by nearly 99 percent from 130,000 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904. Of greater consequence were the thousands of African Americans who were lynched during the period, including 105 in 1901 alone.4 During this era, the Gettysburg Address became a tool used by both those trying to promote sectional reunification at any cost and the minority on the other side who sought to remind the wider nation of Lincoln ’s vision and the extent to which it had not been fulfilled.The majority used the speech to bind the nation together,while the minority used it to point out its flaws.The particular and divergent parts of the speech both sides invoked set a pattern that would persist throughout the ensuing half century. In The Gettysburg Gospel, Gabor Boritt notes that in the generation after the war, “Lincoln’s words were mostly forgotten,” and that it was not until “late in the century [that] Americans would rediscover Lincoln’s remarks in their own right, call them by the name we still know, begin to turn the text into a revered document, and find the meaning of their country there.”5 But the evidence, much of which Boritt cites, suggests that Lincoln’s words were far from forgotten in the years after the war. As early as 1864,Harper’s Weekly commented,“What President Lincoln said upon the field of Gettysburg in that speech, whose rare felicity not Pericles nor any orator every equaled, is said by every faithful American heart as it contemplates the battle-fields of the last fortnight in Virginia and Georgia.” Significantly, the short news item was reprinted by the Hartford Courant,a Democratic journal that had declined to comment on the speech...