The Lost Gettysburg Address (29 page)

Anderson’s résumé made him the logical choice to conclude the
day’s events. His recent speeches and letters made him even more
attractive to the president’s political allies. He shunned all party
affiliation. No one familiar with his many published orations could
mistake Anderson for a Lincoln acolyte. In his
Letter to the Opera
House Meeting
from February 1863, Anderson held the Democrats
responsible for secession but found the Republicans guilty of
“making that ruin utterly remediless and hopeless.” While he did not
approve of Republican policies, he refused to do anything to obstruct
them, since they wielded the power of his nation “in a struggle for
its very life.” In his May 1863 speech to the Xenia, Ohio, Union
Club, Anderson downplayed Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus,
calling the order a “mild restraint of a few dangerous traitors for a
brief period.” Bold executive action was warranted in a time of civil
war. Anderson remained an unyielding Union man and urged his
listeners to rise above the “low level of party passions and purposes,
and up to that exalted summit of patriotism and wisdom” to a place
where the national interest was paramount. Just as Lincoln kept an
active rival like Salmon P. Chase in his cabinet for most of his first
term, Tod and the president’s other Ohio friends knew that Anderson
could be used most effectively to broaden the appeal of Lincoln’s
message and buttress his military leadership among political opponents.
What Anderson actually said at Gettysburg broke little new ground,
but the fact that he spoke in concert with Everett and Lincoln spoke
volumes.
⁵

Anderson made as strong a case for continuing to prosecute the war
as had been heard by the many dignitaries assembled in Gettysburg
Presbyterian Church. Lincoln and Seward were pleased that the
concluding speaker at such an important event had performed his duty so
well. They also heard a man who, in his zeal to save the Union at any
cost, clung to the same conservative views that Lincoln had once held
on emancipation. Lincoln had moved on to a new, more radical vision
of the postwar Union. He knew that most of America’s citizens were
not there yet. Even so, leaders like Anderson were useful to the
administration. “I am willing to receive any man,” Lincoln explained,
“or class of men, who will help us even a
little
.” Although Anderson
was a self-proclaimed “fossil Whig” and had all but stopped evolving
politically, he was a brave patriot. People who differed with him often
loved him. Nearly everyone respected him.
⁶

Anderson’s ability to electrify an audience was so highly valued
that Republicans abided his independent nature. Anderson chastised
the motives behind emancipation as “ends of doubtful, perhaps vain
benevolence.” His suggestion that a “middle course” was still open to
tolerate slavery within the Union demonstrates how love for his
country had blinded him to the political realities of the day. The president
was not threatened by Anderson’s naïve remark. Lincoln understood
that he had opened the door to freedom with his proclamation and
the arming of black troops. There was no going back to the old order.
When Anderson used the phrase “of a government of the people, for
the people, ever made on earth,” he may have elicited a grin from the
chief executive. Anderson unwittingly borrowed the same, well-used
transcendentalist preacher’s powerful phrasing that the president
had used to close his own address just hours earlier. These words
might have embarrassed the president had Everett spoken them. For
Lincoln, however, it likely reassured him that despite their political
differences, he and Anderson shared similar core values. Months
before the
Gettysburg dedication, Anderson described himself as “a
man having no other religion than a love of Union.”
Lincoln’s own
religious beliefs were mysterious and private, yet he and Anderson
held the same great obsession deep in their hearts. Lincoln had the
political talent to will that dream into reality.
⁷

Politics in the nineteenth century was played out in the
newspapers. The average citizen interpreted the
Gettysburg dedication event
through the lens of partisan press reports.
Reaction to Lincoln’s
address ran the gamut. The
Daily Republican
from Springfield,
Massachusetts, gushed that the president’s address was “a perfect
gem; deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful
and elegant in every word and comma.” Ohio’s
Crisis
, on the other
hand, called Lincoln’s brief speech a “mawkish harangue.” To many,
it was clear that the solemn ceremony also served as the start of
Lincoln’s reelection campaign.
Diarist Adam Gurowski suggested that
Lincoln’s speech served as a preview of his party’s platform for 1864.
The
Wabash Express
published a banner headline the day before the
ceremony that read: “
MR. LINCOLN FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT
.”
Numerous reports of the ceremony placed the reporting of the event
next to a column endorsing Lincoln’s reelection. Newspapers spilled
most of their ink, however, on Everett’s long speech.
⁸

Many Republican newspapers devoted their entire front page to
the featured oration at Gettysburg. Such coverage of the event was no
accident. It was carefully orchestrated political propaganda. Everett
had distributed proof sheets of his speech in advance to newspapers
throughout the North. Some Democratic papers and even the
occasional Southern reporter gave Everett’s long oration valuable
column inches at a time when war news took precedence. Everett was
cast as the strong Union man who once opposed Lincoln but now
made an academic argument fully supporting Lincoln’s war
measures.
Forney’s
Washington Daily Chronicle
called Everett’s effort
“magnificent” and so “vivid as though written on a sunbeam.” The
Cincinnati Enquirer
ridiculed it as “a collection of disjointed drivel
and platitudes; barren in sentiment.” Although Everett waited until
the following year to declare for Lincoln, readers could see that he
was firmly in the president’s camp.
⁹

A frequent criticism of Everett’s speech from all sides intimated
that his oration, however eloquent, was missing something.
Harper’s
Weekly
echoed most Democratic organs, suggesting that the featured
speech lacked heart. One witness described the speaker’s effort as
“beautiful but cold as ice.” Everett himself did not see his role as one
to incite the passions of his audience, especially in such a somber
setting. For his model funeral oration in the vein of the great Greek
statesman Pericles, Everett would not “rise above plain good sense.”
As to the notion of playing to the heartstrings of his audience, Everett
wrote, “I must humbly dissent.” The fire that was lacking in Everett’s
speech appeared in ample measure during Anderson’s concluding
oration. Unfortunately, Everett’s words took up so much space in the
newspapers that there was often little room left for Anderson’s major
speech.
¹⁰

The omission of Anderson’s text from most Republican papers was
one of the few missed opportunities in an event that was a
political triumph for the president. The relatively few that did critique
his effort demonstrated that Anderson was successful in his role as
cheerleader for Lincoln’s aggressive war measures. Ohio’s
Springfield
Republic
noted that the greatest applause came in the “passages
which did not accord with the extremely conciliatory tone of Mr.
Everett’s oration.” After reading Everett’s speech, Abraham Stagg of
the
Columbus Gazette
recalled that the lieutenant governor-elect’s
speech was “the best one made on that occasion.” The
Portage
County Democrat
called Anderson’s oration “the great production of
the day.” Even hostile presses such as the
Crisis
helped serve Lincoln’s
purposes by connecting Anderson to Seward and “their rhetoric [of]
hate and Abolition.” No one who knew Anderson could call him an
abolitionist with a straight face. Lincoln and his political friends had
the Peace Democrats on the defensive.
¹¹

Although Anderson served as Lincoln’s faithful ally in the war
effort, he refused to support the president’s reelection bid. Lincoln’s
more progressive vision had simply passed him by. Anderson’s
national star fizzled out just a few years later. For a brief moment at
Gettysburg, however, he was a powerful tool of the administration—sharp
and pointed but not dulled from overuse. Lincoln ignored him
soon after the event, as there were plenty of such loyal implements
at his immediate disposal. Anderson’s incendiary speech, combined
with the erudite effort of Everett, allowed Lincoln to ascend to that
higher plane to which Anderson wished all politicians would aspire.
In this instance Lincoln the statesman inspired a nation while Lincoln
the politician assembled a winning coalition.

Fellow Countrymen,

We are standing over many Dead. Nor were they gathered here, in
the still successions of passing generations. They have been laid thus
low, neither by the regular gradations of natural diseases, nor by
the chances of accidental calamities. Death has here made one of
his greatest harvests—and all at one fell blow. And the occasion of
their destruction is as memorable as their numbers and its
suddenness. They all fell fighting side by side, heart with heart, as if the
multitudes were one, for their native land and their native institutions
of equal laws and free government. And that Country sends us all
hither, as its representatives, to “take note of their departure”; to
honor their memories, and, from their example, to instruct and to
inspire their surviving co-patriots. And the State of Ohio, impelled by
no narrow and exclusive prejudice of State pride, but as an integral
part of that Nation, with her great full heart, throbbing in deep
sympathy with our National Cause, as the Ocean beats his Giant pulses
in solemn harmony with general Nature, has deputed us to contribute
her evergreen chaplets of amaranth and laurel to the tombs of her
own fallen. For here rest in death her own beloved of the 5th, 7th,
29th, 66th, of the 25th, 55th, 72d, 75th, 82d & 102d Ohio Infantry
and of the 6th and 1st Ohio Cavalry. These were contributions of our
State to the National Sacrifice. Let us therefore, in all simplicity of
truth and with due modesty of manner, so speak and hear, that we
may best discharge our grave duties to the Dead, to the Living and to
the Posterity of our Country and our Kind.

The aptest of all the innumerable tributes to departed worth, ever
cut in marble or flowing through traditions, is that brief sentence,
inscribed beneath the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, over the remains
of its great architect. “Si quaeris monumentum;—circumspica”!

Standing here and now, upon this great Battle-field, we must be
impressed, by this idea, with a new force and a wider and deeper
significancy. I feel it indeed, as a sublime truth. A few weeks ago,
a vast army, well organized; completely equipped; skillfully drilled;
thoroughly disciplined; most ably commanded, inspired, all by the
highest courage and confidence of easy victory and ardent, with a
fanatic zeal of insane delusion against your prosperity, your peace, your
liberties and our common National Unity;—their arms all flashing
gleams of light athwart the startled landscape—their banners and
battle flags all flaunting against the perturbed Air,—marched hither
to this very spot,—to invade, to conquer and to destroy.
But they
were confronted. Our
men, the lovers of their Country; the friends
of equal rights and rational liberty and the enemies only of
oppression, injustice and despotism; leaving their own sweet homes and
their dear Kindred; marching by day and night; through sun and
dust; in thirst and hunger and fatigues; with lesser numbers, but with
equal courage; confronted that proud foe on the very field on which
we stand. How the battle began, how it raged and how it closed, you
now full well know. These things are now recorded history. Suffice it
to say; the Army of Patriotism and Liberty was victorious. The Army
of Treason and Despotism was decisively beaten. 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.

But where are they, who with such patriotic labors, patience and
courage, and with no stronger shields than their own brittle
breastbones, opposed their manly hearts to the deadly missiles of those
wide lines of volleyed thunder?
Alas! my friends, there they lie
. Mute
and still and cold, fallen, “with their backs to the Earth & their feet
to the Foe” there they rest, in that long dark sleep, which can be
awakened only by the last trumpet.

And now my friends let us for a short while, attempt to transfer
our meditations backward, from this hour, to the crisis of that
battle. From the standpoint of its decisive blow, let us speculate upon
results; if the victory had been on the other side. In that case, this
lovely scene—this fair face of Nature would have been scarred and
disfigured through all time. This goodly town, with its accessions
of Bridge and Market and Church; these happy homesteads, with
all their pertaining parts—all these products and developments of
Peace, Industry and Art,—in one word, all this
Civilization
—would
have disappeared from hillside and valley and left, instead, a void of
empty desolation, or, else, the more dismal spectacle of the charred
skeletons of their black and ashy ruins. For; we must not deceive
ourselves, with the charitable faith, that the conspirators, who coolly
plotted the extinguishment of the Nation and the perpetual
extirpation of all these various and grand interests and principles, which
made and is our Nation, would fail to order, or that the hordes of
dupes and zealots, who blindly follow such leaders, would pause
to execute, the destruction of these infinitely lesser things of fence
and barn, of Home and School and Church—of Village and City. As
Treason is the bottom sin, whether of Earth or Hell, you must reflect,
that Traitors are actually elevating themselves in perpetuating any
lesser crimes. Nothing would deter these bold, bad men, except the
want of opportunity and power, or perhaps the fear of retaliation.