Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, S.C./ERR -- At dawn on July 4, 1863, a mist cleared over a small field in Pennsylvania. Bodies of soldiers and horses lay scattered on a grassy pasture now crimson with the blood of the 51,000 casualties amassed during three days of fighting. The small city named Gettysburg was forever immortalized as the site of the bloodiest battle in American history.
For weeks after the battle, many of the Gettysburg dead were dug up from their temporary shallow graves and shipped home. By August, the idea of a permanent national cemetery was being discussed, and Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtain charged David Wills to clean up the city and employ a land architect to lay out the cemetery. By mid-August, Wills had purchased 17 acres of land adjacent to the regular cemetery. The transfer of bodies began with black laborers digging up partially decomposed corpses and transferring them to boxes for $1.59 per body.
On Nov. 9, the dedication ceremony for the cemetery took place with skeletons of horses and confederate bodies still littering the landscape. The three months prior had not been enough time to rid the grounds of the thousands of unburied bodies.
When Wills added Lincoln?s name to those who were to receive an official invitation to the cemetery?s dedication, it was assumed he would not attend. He was invited not as an afterthought by the planning committee, but as a courtesy. What amazed the planners was Lincoln?s earnest desire not only to attend, but also to speak. He was finally asked to add a ?few, appropriate remarks? to the main oration by the renowned speaker Edward
Everett. This was unusual because, during his presidency, Lincoln rarely left Washington, staying away from home only 50 nights during his term of office.
Many thought Lincoln had hardly ever been out of the backwoods settlements of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois before leaving for Washington. Of the 34 states in the Union at the time of his nomination, he had visited 23 and spoken in 17. There were only nine cities in the country with a population of 100,000 or more and Lincoln had been to all of them. He did, however, travel considerably less while in office. By far his most famous excursion while president was to speak at Gettysburg.
Before leaving for Pennsylvania, Lincoln attended a production of The Marble Heart, at Ford?s Theater, a play that featured a young, flamboyant and tempestuous actor Lincoln was extremely impressed with named John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln almost didn?t make the trip due to his son Tad?s severe illness. Nonetheless, he left Washington for Pennsylvania to make a speech he promised would be ?short, short, short.?
A crude stage had been erected, and a private tent stood in the distance for the elderly, nervous Everett, who had a severe urinary ailment. An enormous crowd spilled over the hillside causing those who had witnessed the fighting four months earlier to remark, ?Twice now our city has been overcome by a drove of humanity. Fancy this time they come peacefully.?
Benjamin B. French, a government official, introduced the chief speaker. ?Mr. Everett then arose,? French wrote in his diary, ? and without notes of any kind, pronounced an oration ? two full hours in the delivery.?
Then Lincoln rose. The restless crowd, unmoved by Everett?s forgettable speech, stirred causing a cloud of dust to haze in the afternoon sun. The patrons pressed closer and closer to Lincoln, who spoke without benefit of any kind of amplification. One teen, determined to get as close to Lincoln as possible, hid himself during the early morning inside the hollow stage and sat feet from the leather-faced President, staring intently through the planks of the stage.
Up until then, except for his inaugural address in 1861, the great orator of the still-famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas had done no public speaking as president. It made no difference to Lincoln that he was to be the secondary speaker that day. The committee was of the notion that Lincoln was unable to deliver a dignified, heartfelt dedication address without politics or humor.
Lincoln then began to speak. He was, as he predicted, ?short.? His two-minute, 270-word speech was a humble statement of a great man?s heartfelt concerns.
The Gettysburg Address, as it has become known, called several serious issues of the day to the fore-front of society of the time: how a country at war over slavery would test a new nation?s ability to bounce back from dire adversity; how, despite the present conflict, a new and great destiny lay before a blossoming democracy; and how, if the country must war with itself, it must have a reason for doing so.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Lincoln?s address was the humility with which he delivered it. It was, after all, the humility with which he did most things in his life. He said in his speech, ?The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what [the soldiers] did here.?