The Lost Gettysburg Address (28 page)

Three days before the election, Anderson published articles
supporting Ohio governor
Rutherford B. Hayes for the presidency. His
friends were shocked. Hayes supported Radical Reconstruction and
black suffrage policies that Anderson had opposed. Hayes, however,
was a man of spotless integrity, a fellow Union war veteran, and a
longtime friend. The election was one of the closest and most
controversial in the nation’s history. Hayes claimed that if he were beaten,
it could only be through bribery and corruption in the North and
violence and intimidation in the South. The result was a
constitutional crisis. Tilden finished with a 250,000 vote plurality but was
one vote short of victory in the electoral college. Irregularities in four
states meant that both parties claimed their votes. Republicans had
hard evidence of voter intimidation in the South, where Tilden had
posted large wins. Congress created a commission to decide the
election and Anderson worried. “I almost subside into the chilly darkness
of despair,” he wrote to his daughter Kitty. “The future is black with
hopeless portents,” he moaned.
¹⁰

Hayes and the Democrats finally arranged a deal whereby Hayes
would be awarded the disputed states, thus winning the election by a
single electoral vote. In return, the new president agreed to withdraw
troops from the South, with the condition that the voting rights of
all citizens, black and white, would be respected. Reconstruction was
over. It would not take long before Democrats throughout the South
would use home rule to reassert white dominance and effectively
disfranchise blacks for nearly one hundred years.

Anderson resisted further attempts by others to rekindle his interest
in politics. The occasional overtures for a judgeship or other
patronage job wafted his way, but these schemes were mere tokens of respect
for the ex-governor. When
Larz died after years of failing health,
Charles’s attention turned inward. He focused on ensuring a sound
future for his children and securing his father’s
family legacy. He
tackled both tasks with ardor and energy.

Despite a lifetime of financial booms and busts,
Anderson had
several ventures that finally yielded steady returns. His model town of
Kuttawa was now more than a dream. It was a self-sustaining and
moderately prosperous little village. In 1880 he opened the Kuttawa
Mineral Springs resort, which became a well-known vacation
destination in the region. Visitors stayed at the resort’s hotel near a
spring-fed swimming pool, food stands, and mineral springs. Anderson’s
Kuttawa Iron Ore Company was also successful. Lyon County had
fewer than seven thousand residents in 1880, but the future looked
bright. Anderson had designed his own pastoral playground. He
published papers on a wide variety of subjects, including proposed
techniques for the profitable extraction of natural gas. When it came
time to cash in his excess property in 1890, Anderson sold all but one
thousand acres for $160,000. Larz would have been proud.

Anderson always had a passion for history. As he entered the
twilight of a long and eventful life, he became obsessed with the
responsibility of cementing his family’s place for posterity. He wrote
and spoke tirelessly for the final fifteen years of his life, producing a
wealth of insight into the great events of the American experience.
He wrote a long account of his childhood on the family’s Kentucky
plantation. He wanted to ensure that the world would not forget
his patriot father. It pained Anderson to visit his father’s overgrown
grave. “All memory of that heroic patriot and of his once noted home,
Soldier’s Retreat,” bemoaned Anderson, “is utterly lost.” In a
twenty-three-page letter to his nephew, Anderson proposed that they raise
funds to move his father’s body to Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville
and erect a monument similar to Zachary Taylor’s. Larz had written
the simple epitaph but had placed the monument in “a secret hidden
away spot of forgotten ground.” This was no place to “elevate father’s
family name as high in the national sphere as is warranted,” claimed
Anderson. His appeal drew little interest until years after his own
death.
¹¹

Anderson was prolific in his correspondence and much in demand
for speaking engagements in his later years. He was asked on
countless occasions to reprise his experiences in the Texas secession
treachery, the bloody battlefield of Stones River, the contentious
gubernatorial election of 1863, and many other events. He responded with
both generosity and frankness. While most Southerners adopted a
mythical, Lost Cause version of Civil War history, many Northerners
tried to heal old wounds by glossing over past sectional differences.
Anderson ignored both camps and spoke the unchangeable truth as
he saw it then and still believed it.

His talented son,
Latham, had been brevetted a brigadier general
after the end of the Civil War. Latham went on to modest success
as a civil engineer. Tuberculosis forced Latham to move in with his
cousin, Dr. Charles Anderson of Santa Barbara, California, where
he died on June 9, 1910.
Daughter Kitty never married after losing
her fiancé,
Will Jones, at Chickamauga. She founded the first Sunday
school in Eddyville, Kentucky, later moving to her
sister Belle’s home
in Phoenix, Arizona, where she died in 1928. Belle, the youngest
child, married former Confederate officer
Thomas C. Skinner. She
also died in 1928. Kitty and Belle were responsible for saving nearly
all of Charles Anderson’s important papers.
Eliza Brown Anderson
outlived Charles as well, dying at their home in Kuttawa, Kentucky,
in 1901 at age eighty-five. She was a devout Christian, quietly
devoted to her husband. Her letters reveal a traditional woman whose
sole focus was the physical and spiritual well-being of her family.
Eliza was buried beside her husband in Kuttawa Cemetery.

Anderson wrote that when his own time came, he wanted his
family to “hide his corpse away in the nearest fence corner, in
preference to parading the disagreeable object above ten miles for
sepulture.” Perhaps he felt that he could never live up to what he saw
as his father’s more significant legacy. He personally designed his
own gravestone. It was “a mere slab, containing naked names with
three events: births, marriage and death.” “It has a double white pine
tree,” Anderson elaborated, “with a double bed at its base, for us
two, in our last long sleep, after sleeping together, so peacefully, in all
these 50 years.” A prolonged illness in the summer of 1895 had given
Anderson time to get his affairs in order. He wrote a new will
devising his property to his children and grandchildren, as their need was
greater than Eliza’s. The will read like a promotional piece for the
planned sale of Kuttawa as a unit to railroad interests. The document
exceeded sixty pages but was never completed or probated. Anderson
died September 2, 1895. For one of the few times in his eighty-one
years, Charles Anderson’s energy ran out before his ink did.
¹²

P
RESIDENT LINCOLN’S
272 words at
Gettysburg may be the
most famous speech in the English language. Generations of
American schoolchildren have memorized it. Legions of
historians have waded through a 150-year accretion of myth and legend
in order to derive truth and meaning from the brief text. Celebrated
scholars have conducted tireless studies of extant versions of the
manuscript, tracking Lincoln’s every move in the days and hours leading
up to the address. Has any secular speech ever been subject to this
degree of forensic examination? Yet new sources continue to come to
light in both photographs and documents, hinting at answers to the
persistent fog of mystery surrounding Lincoln’s iconic address.

The recent discovery of Charles Anderson’s Gettysburg speech
manuscript may not seem so significant in the shadow of Lincoln’s
masterpiece. After all, Anderson’s speech was not part of the formal
battlefield program. Neither Lincoln nor any of his cabinet
members had direct input into Anderson’s oration before it was delivered.
Widening the camera aperture from a granular analysis of the text
itself to the broader context of the event reveals an important
perspective of the speeches of Edward Everett, Abraham Lincoln, and
Charles Anderson as a rhetorical ensemble.

The dedication of the
Gettysburg Soldier’s Cemetery was not
merely a way to honor fallen heroes at the most famous battle of
the war. It was the administration’s most important political event
since Lincoln’s election three years earlier. The timing of the
consecration could not have been better. Union Party election victories
in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York had blunted the efforts of
so-called Peace Democrats to rally support for an armistice with the
Confederacy. A large assembly of loyal governors, military heroes,
foreign dignitaries, and other influential people regarded the
dedication as a must-see event. In this unusual setting, Lincoln began his
bid for reelection in earnest.
¹

Lincoln believed that only a decisive military victory cemented by
his own reelection would save the Union. To achieve both, he
constructed a tenuous coalition of constituents from across the Northern
political spectrum. Only a masterful leader could get abolitionists,
conservatives, border state Unionists, and “War Democrats” to join
his political acolytes and pull, more or less, in one direction. The
war to preserve the Union had to be won, not only on the battlefield
and at the polling place but also in the hearts and minds of a diverse
group of citizens.
Gettysburg was an opportunity to move that
process forward.

Besides an abundant assemblage of dignitaries, grieving families of
soldiers, and throngs of curious onlookers, Lincoln’s political
operatives were everywhere. His two personal secretaries,
John Hay and
John G. Nicolay, were joined by Pennsylvania newspaper editor
John
Wein Forney. Forney was such an outspoken administration advocate
that some Democrats called him “Lincoln’s dog.” Loyal governors
packed train cars with important Republican editors who would
supply the appropriate spin to the dedication. Democratic editors howled
in protest, suggesting that Lincoln and his minions had turned a
sacred event into an “insensate carnival.” Those denunciations rang
hollow. Many Democrats who had lost sons and fathers in the war
appreciated the president’s efforts to memorialize them.
²

Lincoln’s speech was political genius. Not only did the language rise
above partisanship, it actually transcended sectional animosity. The
speech bridged divisions emerging within his own party between
conservatives who favored gradual emancipation and conciliatory terms
for the South, and those who argued for Radical Reconstruction.
As historian Martin P. Johnson has suggested, Lincoln was “talking
moderate but leaning radical.” However clever and calculating the
president was in crafting his speech, two to three minutes was not
enough time to properly honor the dead and make the case for
aggressively prosecuting the war. Lincoln needed two traditional
orations to bookend his remarks.
Everett and Anderson performed that
task admirably.
³

Lincoln played no active part in the selection of either featured
orator. He knew both men personally, though he was much better
acquainted with Everett. The president, Secretary
Seward, and the
rest of
Lincoln’s inner circle had read numerous speeches by both
men and knew what to expect. Anderson had supported Bell and
Everett, not Lincoln, for president in 1860. Neither Anderson nor
Everett had always been in lockstep with Lincoln, but this was also
the case with many in the president’s own cabinet. All three featured
speakers shared a devotion to the Union that could not be rivaled.
Lincoln’s mastery of the art of political consensus-building suggests
that he was comfortable in such an ensemble. It suited his purposes.

Everett’s opening speech was classic in every sense. He had given
many memorial orations throughout the East. As a part of the
consecration ceremonies, Everett’s speech was strictly circumscribed to
fit the traditional boundaries of eulogy on the battlefield. By the time
Lincoln was composing his address, he had seen an advance copy of
the opening oration. The rhetorical heavy lifting done by Everett in
his two-hour dissertation freed Lincoln to speak from inspiration.
When Lincoln sat down following his brief address, stunned listeners
must have wondered how such an optimistic vision could be achieved
under such dire circumstances. Lincoln’s restrained elegance
compelled his audience to read between the lines of “unfinished work”
and to divine the meaning of “the great task remaining.” To blatantly
call for an acceleration of an immense and bloody war effort would
have been ghastly in the context of a cemetery dedication. So Lincoln
suggested that his hearers “take increased devotion to that cause,”
and left it for Anderson to spell it out for them.

The choice of the day’s concluding speaker was critical to the
success of the event. Ohio governor David Tod made the decision, as
he told Anderson, “upon consultation with several of our mutual
friends.” The historical record stands silent as to their identity. Tod,
however, was a stalwart Lincoln supporter. He was intimately
involved in recruiting thousands of volunteers for the Union Army.
Lincoln eventually offered the job of secretary of the treasury to Tod,
who declined due to poor health. Tod’s predecessor as Ohio
governor,
William Dennison, chaired the Ohio rally at Gettysburg. Lincoln
later appointed him postmaster general. Ohio’s importance in the
upcoming presidential election could hardly be overemphasized. It
was in Lincoln’s best interest to court favor with Ohioans and to
rally their most influential leaders behind the administration’s war
effort. Anderson held impeccable credentials in this respect. Where
else could Lincoln find a former slave owner and border state Union
man who had escaped from a Confederate prison, been wounded on
the battlefield, and helped defeat the most notorious Copperhead in
the North? Anderson completed the work that Everett began,
framing the president’s remarks and concluding with a call to action.
⁴