Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [37]
Some southerners also recognized the pivotal importance of Gettysburg. “The news from Lee's army is appalling,” wrote Confederate War Department clerk John B. Jones in his diary on July 9. “This is the darkest day of the war.” The fire-eating Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin “never before felt so despondent as to our struggle.” Confederate Ordnance Chief Josiah Gorgas, who had performed miracles to keep Southern armies supplied with weapons and ammunition, wrote in his diary at the end of July 1863: “Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburg, and even Philadelphia. Vicks-burg seemed to laugh all Grant's efforts to scorn.… It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion.”
By this time Lincoln had recovered his spirits. In early August his private secretary wrote that the president “is in fine whack. I have seldom seen him so serene.” In addition to other Union military successes that took place in the latter half of 1863, the administration's emancipation policy gained broader support in the North. The Union army began organizing black regiments composed mainly of former slaves. They acquitted themselves well in minor battles during 1863. The off-year state elections of 1863, especially in the key states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, were shaping up as a sort of referendum on the Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans won impressive victories in those elections. If the Emancipation Proclamation had been submitted to a referendum a year earlier, commented an Illinois newspaper in November, “there is little doubt that the voice of a majority would have been against it. And not a year has passed before it is approved by an overwhelming majority.” A New Yorker noted that “the change of opinion on this slavery question since 1860 is a great historical fact. God pardon our blindness of three years ago.”
No single event did more to change the Northern mood than the victory at Gettysburg. It was appropriate, therefore, that Lincoln should offer the most profound and eloquent statement there on the meaning of this new birth of freedom.
Soon after the battle, David Wills, a Gettysburg lawyer, proposed to Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania the establishment of a soldiers’ cemetery where the Union dead could be reburied with dignity and honor. Curtin contacted the governors of other Northern states whose soldiers had died at Gettysburg. They all thought it was a splendid idea. The project went forward, and became the model for reinterment of Union war dead in two dozen national cemeteries during and after the war. (Many Confederate dead were reburied in Confederate cemeteries throughout the South.) The dedication of the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg, adjacent to the local burial ground where some of the fighting had taken place, occurred on November 19, 1863.
Let us conclude our walk by proceeding to this most hallowed of ground, where some 3,577 Union soldiers (half of them unknown) from eighteen states are buried. None of them was from Kentucky. But at the spot where Lincoln was long thought to have stood to deliver his “few appropriate remarks,” Kentucky erected a modest marker to her native son, enshrining in bronze the 272 words of the address Lincoln delivered that day. (The actual spot was probably thirty yards to the south, but it hardly matters.) Edward Everett, the main orator of the occasion, penned Lincoln a note next day: “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
It is best to come here at dusk, as I do when