The Lost Gettysburg Address (24 page)

Everett’s speaking style was classical in every sense. He prepared
meticulously for each major oration and usually memorized his
speeches. He had poured over maps of the battlefield and interviewed
participants. His purpose was not only to honor the dead but also
to inform and inspire the living. Battlefield memorials were his
specialty. He had given memorial speeches at Lexington, Concord, and
Bunker Hill. Everett was world renowned for his dramatic flair, his
sweet, almost musical voice, and his commanding stage presence. He
rivaled the great actors of his day in his ability to hold an audience
spellbound for hours. But the Massachusetts icon was also a sick old
man who would be dead in a little more than a year. This was to be
one of his last important moments.

Everett’s oration did not disappoint. He opened his address by
demonstrating his intimate knowledge of Greek culture and
military history, comparing the present consecration to the funerary
customs of ancient Athens. Referencing the funerary speech of the
great Pericles before him, Everett relished his unusual opportunity
to eulogize the recently slain on the very soil they died defending.
One observer appreciated the intelligence of the speaker, as he placed
the epic battle into the broader context of world history. This same
witness remarked that, despite Everett’s regal bearing, he appeared
somewhat aloof, like a Greek statue. Others listened with “breathless
silence” as tears streamed down their cheeks.

Everett delivered a long discourse on the history of both the
Gettysburg battle and the war. He laid blame for the conflict squarely
on the shoulders of ambitious politicians from the cotton states.
Everett made his case in the dignified and learned manner he felt was
appropriate to such an occasion. The famous orator did not need to
use incendiary language to repeat well-worn charges against the
enemies of the Union. Yet he appeared naive in his conciliatory call for
reunion at the close of his speech. The great masses of Southerners,
he claimed, held “no bitterness” against the government in the North.
On the contrary, they were “yearning to see the dear old flag floating
upon their capitols, and they sigh for the return of peace, prosperity
and happiness, which they enjoyed under a government whose power
was felt only in its blessings.” History would prove him wrong on this
point. Recrimination was lodged deep in the hearts of most citizens
of both sections, the North and the South, after nearly three years of
bloody slaughter.
⁵

Lincoln’s famous address was intended to be little more than the
brief “dedicatory remarks” mentioned in the event programs. His
two-minute masterpiece stood in sharp contrast to Everett’s
two-hour dissertation. Unlike Everett,
Lincoln had not mastered Greek
and was hardly an expert on classical history. His simple, direct
language came from the heart. The president’s words transcended the
battle itself, imparting lasting meaning to the immense sacrifice and
tying the results of the war to a new vision of America’s future. In the
last third of his remarks, Lincoln referred to an “unfinished work”
and “great task” without specifically mentioning either the war or
the South. The great cause of reunion was in the hands of the people,
as the president so elegantly stated. Under his leadership they would
win the war and save the republic.

The dedication ceremony broke up around two in the afternoon.
Governor Tod announced that the Ohio delegation’s meeting would
be held at the Gettysburg Presbyterian Church on Baltimore Street
early that evening. The building had been used as a hospital for
cavalry troops during the battle but was restored in time for the event.
Tod urged Lincoln, Seward, and other important personages to
attend the gathering so they could hear Anderson speak. They readily
accepted the invitation. This was supposed to be Anderson’s show,
but an ordinary seventy-year-old tradesman ended up stealing the
headlines.
⁶
Old
John Burns was a grizzled veteran of the War of
1812. When the rebels appeared near the doorstep of his farm in
sleepy Gettysburg, the old shoemaker grabbed his ancient rifle and
begged Union commanders to enlist his aid as a sharpshooter to help
defend the town. California writer and poet Bret Harte composed a
ballad about him:

The only man who didn’t back down

When the rebels rode through his native town;

But held his own in the fight next day,

When all his town folk ran away.
⁷

Burns mustered in with the 105th Pennsylvania Volunteers on the
spot. It was said that he brought down three Confederate soldiers.
Lincoln had heard the tale and made Burns his special guest for the
evening. The aged hero and the president walked arm in arm in an
informal procession to the Presbyterian Church. Before the president
arrived, an overflowing assembly had been seated.

Governor Tod called the meeting to order. Tod appointed
ex-governor William Dennison chairman of the meeting and instructed
journalist I. P. Allen to function as secretary. Tod hoped that the
meeting would comfort the families of fallen soldiers to know that Ohio
not only appreciated their sacrifice but also understood what it meant
to the great cause of reunion. Some attendees urged General
Robert
C. Schenck to say a few words, but the “Hero of Vienna” declined
to upstage his old friend Anderson. With the formalities concluded
about a quarter past five, Lincoln,
Seward, and the secretary of the
interior
James P. Usher made their entrance to the enthusiastic
applause of the capacity crowd. Burns, wearing the simple costume of a
country farmer, sat in a pew between Lincoln and Seward. Dennison
rose and introduced the featured speaker, who was treated to
“rousing cheers” by the large audience.
Anderson was in his
element.
⁸

Anderson’s oration was, in comparison to the words of Everett and
Lincoln, as a revival meeting is to a formal homily and a benediction.
Everett was erudite and subdued. Anderson was fiery and
provocative. Whereas Lincoln promised a restoration of freedom and
republican ideals, Anderson vowed to crush the rebellion at any cost. Fresh
off a vitriolic campaign where defeat foretold unimaginable political
consequences, the lieutenant governor-elect had a message to deliver:
The memorial is over. This is a rally. Let’s go forth and finish the job
at hand. He began with an admonition, so that the crowd would not
misunderstand the purpose of the convocation. Even though Ohio
was the only state to hold its own meeting in conjunction with the
dedication ceremonies, this was “no narrow and exclusive prejudice
of state pride.” Theirs was a meeting to promote the national interest.
Ohio had sacrificed her fathers and sons for the Union cause. All of
the loyal states had a solemn duty to uphold: repay the national
sacrifice and restore peace and prosperity to the country.
⁹

Anderson had credibility when it came to speaking about personal
sacrifice to the Union cause. His border-state upbringing and long
residence in a free state gave him a broad perspective on the key issues of
the war. His legendary political independence assured listeners that
his words were not merely propaganda emanating from an
administration true-believer. His differences with Lincoln were well known,
but on the one overriding issue, he and Lincoln were on exactly the
same page. He stood in the church at
Gettysburg as an unyielding
apostle of Unionism. The audience listened with interest and respect.

The speaker dispensed with Everett’s conciliatory tone and spoke
in a more direct manner. In memorial gatherings it was customary to
tread cautiously so as not to offend the living, Anderson admitted,
but “the dead must have justice at their own graves.” One should not
be overly concerned with refinement or charity in such dire
circumstances, Anderson insisted. Instead, he said, “We should speak and
judge  .  .  .  without the cowardice of fearing that our catholic truths
shall be miscalled politics.” This was the proper way to respect the
dead and their ultimate sacrifice. The retired colonel then launched
into a withering attack on the invaders with images of brutal
honesty that were the hallmarks of his verbose yet engaging style. “That
host of rebels, deluded and sent hither by conspirators and traitors,
were vanquished and fled cowering in dismay from this land of Penn
and Franklin—of Peace and Freedom—across the Potomac into the
domain of Calhoun and Davis—of oligarchic rule and despotic
oppressions.” Anderson defined treason as “the bottom sin” and used
biblical passages from Luke, excerpts from Shakespeare, and the
poetry of Byron and Shelley to illustrate his points.

But his choicest missiles were launched straight from the heart.
Anderson mocked the Southern conspirators as debased aristocrats
who “were born into the inheritance of unjust power; nurtured by the
milk of slaves and slavery, rocked in their cradle by servile hands.”
Southern planters were “schooled in their lessons and their sports,
into the indulgences of unrestrained passions,” only to be “indulged,
persuaded and flattered by Northern Allies and Panderers.” These
privileged despots, “cultured into morbid activities and pampered, at
last, into insane, parricidal, suicidal arrogance,” plotted against and
eventually betrayed “our very Civilization as a people.” Anderson
was getting carried away by his own passion and recrimination. The
crowd ate it up.

The very dead that lay just yards away were not sleeping the
peaceful sleep of honored heroes that Everett spoke of so calmly and
eloquently. “Their blood cries out from all this beloved ground,”
Anderson exclaimed, “to all these wide heavens above, for God has
heard that cry.” He warned that “a yet bloodier retribution
awaits—nay now falls upon—those wretched men, whose crime neither Earth
can hide nor the seas can cleanse.” The speaker was careful to
absolve the majority of his Southern brethren and even military
leaders like the noble Lee from his excoriating characterizations. “The
wicked purposes of vile and desperate politician traitors,” Anderson
explained, “have overruled the good dispositions and infatuated and
misguided the honest impulses” of the people.

At stake in the terrible conflict, Anderson insisted, was a cause
much greater than a particular political or military leader. This was
a people’s war fought for sacred principles. With characteristic
audacity, the excited speaker faced Lincoln and presented a chilling
scenario. “Let them seize and destroy our National City—its wood into
ashes and its marble into sand. Let them imprison—hang—burn our
President with all the heads and hands of the departments.  .  .  .  Yet
we are still a nation. Foreign monarchy must understand—Domestic
Oligarchy must re-learn, that our National Being flows on forever in
a stream of moral principles and not through any chain of printed
deeds or written charters.” This was a macabre scene painted by an
excited partisan. It was certainly an Anderson original. Lincoln and
his cabinet members may have squirmed in their pews, but the
audience cheered “wildly.”

Survival of the republican ideal, Anderson claimed, was the
nation’s God-given destiny. The course of nature will not change “to
please a junta of insane slavery oligarchs,” the speaker assured the
crowd. Society cannot go backward “into the chaos of black
barbarism and of red despotism, at the bidding of these puny and palsied
Canutes of South Carolina and Mississippi,” Anderson roared. The
assembly broke into immense cheering in response to this creative
insult to their arch enemies. Applause and shouting continued for
several minutes. When he resumed, Anderson sketched a convincing
picture of the everyday soldier. They died, not for political purposes,
nor to free the slaves, but “to save the nation’s life.” Their
homespun honesty and humble nobility made an effective contrast with the
monstrous personalities that Anderson had just finished inventing.
¹⁰

Once he had gained his audience’s attention, Anderson repeated a
familiar refrain, lauding America as an original and exceptional new
creation of civil government. Disunion by the traitors destroyed not
only the best government ever created by man but also disrupted
commerce and threatened to end what had been unprecedented
prosperity. The mere suggestion that the two sections could exist as separate
nations with common borders and not end up as two warring,
military regimes was preposterous. The ensuing military republic in the
North would be only slightly less evil than the military oligarchy that
already existed in the Confederate States. The defeat of Vallandigham
should have put that issue to rest, but Anderson had an inkling that
the fantasy of a peaceable separation might resurface. The lion could
only lie down with the lamb if the lion became like a lamb, not the
other way around. The cheers from the audience resumed.

As the address was winding down, Anderson could not resist the
impulse to offer his opinion on the most controversial topic of the
day: the emancipation of the slaves. He had committed political
suicide in public so many times that he had lost all fear of retribution.
Lincoln and especially the radical abolitionist Seward must have
braced themselves at the broaching of the subject. The Democrats
had been playing the race card for many years. As long as the
opposition press tried to claim that the war’s sole purpose was abolition,
the Peace Party would be a force to reckon with.

The Copperheads argued that general emancipation would release
a flood of black barbarism and cheap labor and create a huge
dependent pauper class in the North. These predictions were valid,
according to Anderson, only if a separate slave nation were to be established
alongside the free North. If slavery were to be abolished throughout
the South, on the other hand, the freedmen would have little
incentive to pick up and move. The speaker said that he was willing to
“tolerate the master-disease and crime within the Union” for a time until
it gradually ran its course. This was the position favored by Lincoln
earlier in his political career. The key was reunion, with or without
slavery, according to Anderson. That said, he shared the fears of the
vast majority of his fellow Ohio citizens. They could not abide a
sudden influx of black faces taking up residence in the house next door.