A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [312]
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On November 19 the president was going to Gettysburg—whose 23,000 Union casualties in July remained the highest of any battle of the war—to speak at the dedication of the town’s new war cemetery. The solemn and painful task was made worse by the uncertainty in the west; Lincoln would have to address the mourners with Rosecrans’s disaster at Chickamauga still fresh in their minds. However, Lincoln did not wish to dwell on the dangers facing the country, or why duty had to be its own reward at such a time. He already had a theme for the speech, one advocated three months earlier by Seward’s financial emissary to London, John Murray Forbes, whose perspective on the meaning of the war had sharpened during his travels abroad. “John Bright and his glorious band of English republicans can see that we are fighting for democracy,” Forbes had written to Lincoln on September 8. “After we get military successes, the mass of the Southern people must be made to see this truth, and then reconstruction becomes easy and permanent.”18
A large retinue accompanied Lincoln to Gettysburg, including Seward, several governors and senators, and the French minister, Henri Mercier, but not Lord Lyons, who did not receive an invitation. Although the reasons for the visit were somber, the crowds greeted Lincoln with enthusiasm and lined up in large numbers to shake his hand. The principal speaker at the ceremony was not the president but the great orator Edward Everett, whose age and infirmities were sadly evident in parts of his speech. Everett spoke for more than two hours during the unusually hot afternoon, tripping up occasionally and at one point confusing Meade with Lee.19
When he was finished, the audience steeled itself for another long speech, not knowing that Lincoln had been asked by the organizers to be short and concise. The two-minute address was over so quickly that the photographer did not have time to focus his lens, and many among the fifteen thousand listeners had not yet settled down. Lincoln himself believed that his words had fallen flat. Several newspapers criticized him for failing to live up to the occasion.20 Antonio Gallenga, a temporary correspondent for The Times, thought that Lincoln’s speech had been a total failure. English readers were told that the “imposing ceremony” was “rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”21 But Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay recorded in his diary that the president spoke “in a firm free way, with more grace than is his wont.”22 Edward Everett had no doubts about the momentous nature of Lincoln’s speech. He congratulated Lincoln, confessing that he wished “I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”23 Everett realized that Lincoln had captured the essential nature of the war. In a mere 272 words, the president had defined the moral purpose of the country’s existence—democracy, freedom, equality—not only for the mourners at Gettysburg but for every subsequent generation of the American people. The Revolution of 1776 had brought forth:
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 battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that