The battlefield of Gettysburg was made sacred by the men who died there for Freedom's sake and also by the men who died there for the sake of what they honestly thought were the rights of the Slave States. Congress made the battlefield a Soldiers' Cemetery. It was to be dedicated to its great memories on November 19, 1863. The morning before a special train left Washington for Gettysburg. It carried President Lincoln, Secretary of State Seward, two other members of the Cabinet, the two private secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, the distinguished Pennsylvanian, Wayne MacVeagh, later U. S. Attorney-General and later still our Minister to Italy, and others of lesser note. Among those latter was the Hon. Thomas Strong, who had been made one of the party by Lincoln's kind thoughtfulness. It was he who afterwards told his son the story of Lincoln's Gettysburg speech, scarcely regarded at the moment, but long since recognized as one of the masterpieces of English literature.
The little town of Gettysburg was in a ferment that November night, when the President's train arrived. It was full of people and bands and whisky. Crowds strolled through the streets, serenading statesmen and calling for speeches with an American crowd's insatiable appetite for talky-talk. "MacVeagh," says Hay, "made a most beautiful and touching speech of five minutes," but another Pennsylvanian made a most disgusting and drunken speech of many minutes. Lincoln and most of his party of course had no share in all this brawling merriment. He and Seward had talked briefly to shouting thousands early in the evening.
On the way up from Washington, the President had sat in a sad abstraction. He took little part in the talk that buzzed about him. Once, when MacVeagh was vehemently declaiming about the way the Southern magnates were misleading the Southern masses, Lincoln said with a weary smile one of those sayings of his which will never be forgotten. "You can fool part of the people all the time; you can fool all the people part of the time; but you can't fool all the people all the time." Then he became silent again. He did not know what he was to say on the morrow. The chief oration was to be by Edward Everett of Massachusetts, a trained orator, fluent and finished in polished phrase. He had been Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to England, Secretary of State, United States Senator. He was handsome, distinguished, graceful. The ungainly President felt that he and his words would be but a foil to Everett and his sonorous sentences, sentences that were sure to come rolling in like "the surge and thunder of the Odyssey." Everett had graduated from Harvard, Lincoln from a log-cabin. Both must face on the morrow the same audience.
The President searched his pockets and found the stub of a pencil. From the aisle of the car, he picked up a piece of brown wrapping paper, thrown there by Seward, who had just opened a package of books in the opposite seat. He penciled a few words, bent his head upon his great knotted hand in thought, then penciled a few more. Then he struck out some words and added others, read his completed task and did not find it good. He shook his head, stuffed the brown wrapping paper into his pocket, and took up again his interrupted talk with MacVeagh.
At eleven the next morning, from an open-air platform on the battlefield, Everett held the vast audience through two hours of fervent speech, fervent with patriotism, fervent also with bitterness against the men he called "the Southern rebels." His speech was literature and his voice was music. As the thunder of his peroration ended a thunderstorm of applause began. When it, too, died away, there shambled to the front of the platform an ungainly, badly dressed man, contrasting sharply and in every way disadvantageously with Everett of the silver tongue. This man's tongue betrayed him too. He tried to pitch his voice to reach all that vast audience and his first words came in a squeaking falsetto. A titter ran through the crowd. Lincoln stopped speaking. There were a few seconds of painful silence. Then he came to his own. With a voice enriched by a passionate sincerity, he began again and finished his Gettysburg speech. Here it is:
"Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this Continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or to detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
The President ceased to speak. There was no thunderstorm of applause such as had followed Everett's studied sentences and polished periods. There was no applause at all. One long stir of emotion throbbed through the silent throng, but did not break the silence. Then the multitude dispersed, talking of what Everett had said, thinking of what Lincoln had said. Most of the notables on the platform thought the President's speech a failure. Time has shown that it was one of the greatest things even he ever did.
Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews has written in her short story "The Perfect Tribute" the history of the Gettysburg speech. The boy who would know what manner of man our Abraham Lincoln was should read "The Perfect Tribute." One of the characters in the story, a dying Confederate officer, says to Lincoln without knowing to whom he was speaking: "The speech so went home to the hearts of all those thousands of people that when it ended it was as if the whole audience held its breath—there was not a hand lifted to applaud. One might as well applaud the Lord's prayer—it would be sacrilege. And they all felt it—down to the lowest. There was a long minute of reverent silence, no sound from all that great throng—it seems to me, an enemy, that it was the most perfect tribute that has ever been paid by any people to any orator."
The Gettysburg speech was not for the moment. It is for all time.