The Lost Gettysburg Address

by David T. Dixon

  Anderson produced extensive plans and drawings of his model community in his own hand. He took care to name each feature in the same sort of romantic language that Frederick Law Olmsted had used decades earlier in enticing Anderson to settle in Texas. Vista Ridge overlooked the river on one side and the town on the other. Mineral springs named Mint, Diamond, Opal, and Wild Rose promised youth-renewing waters capable of curing various diseases and afflictions. The thirty-acre artificial Loch Clough was perfectly situated for visitors traveling to a planned resort to enjoy boating, swimming, and other recreational pursuits. Silver Cliffs was a lovely park that stood hundreds of feet above the languid Cumberland. Anderson envisioned a world-class university perched atop these cliffs, if he could only get Leland Stanford, John D. Rockefeller, or Cornelius Vanderbilt to fund the project. When a friend asked Anderson why he had planned the streets and avenues to be unusually wide, he responded that someday a new method of conveyance would grace the streets of his beautiful Kuttawa. He just did not know what that new vehicle might look like.6

  Anderson walked his property daily, meticulously planning each landscape feature. He also took time to write letters to old friends and family. There was much to correspond about, especially with old Texas friends whom he had left behind. Foremost among those friends was his “deliverer, that noblest of all the heroines of this dreadful, yet glorious war, Mrs. Ludlum.” Anderson found her reasonably well, despite her harsh treatment at the hands of the Texas rebels. He petitioned for Ludlum’s appointment as postmistress in San Antonio, but the job was given to someone else. Will Bayard, the young man who had joined Anderson in his escape from Camp Dorn, was attempting to advance a stalled military career. He reported being shunned by Texas relatives who felt betrayed by him. J. C. Houzeau, who had also risked his life to free Anderson, was living in New Orleans, editing the bilingual New Orleans Tribune.

  George Paschall reported that Governor Pendleton Murrah had robbed the Texas treasury and had drunk himself to death in Monterrey, Mexico, where a number of ex-Confederates had settled. Paschall called it a “buffalo stampede.” Anderson’s jailor, Henry E. McCulloch, “had the temerity to remain,” but Texas chief justice Royal T. Wheeler, who had boasted of his part in Anderson’s arrest, proved himself “a coward even in suicide.” Paschall described Wheeler “shooting at himself a year before he took his shameless life.” One of Anderson’s closest Texas friends was Presley Edwards, who had stayed on and cooperated with the rebels. “I think you do injustice to many of your old friends,” Edwards wrote in 1870. “There was a discrimination to be made between Unionists and Anti-Secessionists,” Edwards claimed. Hard-core, unconditional Southern Union men like Anderson were a rare breed. Most men stood by Anderson until the war began, Edwards explained, but then accepted the sectional reality of the conflict. The war had been over five years, and even Anderson admitted that he still loved old neighbors like his cousin Florida Tunstall, “even if she is a rebel.”7

  There was one relationship in Anderson’s life that needed repairing most of all. His brother Marshall had been shunned by many Ohioans on account of his Copperhead sympathies. Marshall was estranged from his family due to his strident Catholicism and his attacks on Charles during the 1863 gubernatorial election. Marshall elected to move to Mexico in 1865, ostensibly to join an archeological expedition. His primary aim was to assist Matthew Maury in establishing the New Virginia Colony as a refuge for former Confederates. The scheme was a failure and Marshall returned home the following year. His sons and sister were not speaking to him by this time. Charles, on the other hand, reached out to his older brother immediately upon his return and made a generous overture to resume their brotherly affection. Their brother John had died after contracting dysentery while visiting a Union Army camp in August 1863. Robert was failing steadily, and Larz had become chronically ill. This was no time to let past political or religious differences diminish the importance of family.

  In December 1872, Charles Anderson began an extended correspondence with Marshall and revealed an intimate secret that he had never shared with anyone outside of his immediate family. Charles was an atheist. “I have long struggled to conceal this want of faith from others as well as myself,” the younger brother admitted. It was a lonely situation for Anderson, seeing his brothers and sisters “safe and happy in a Christian faith,” while he remained an outsider in “a mere prescribed negation, a vacuity in faith.” It had been this way his whole life, he said, despite the positive examples set by his brothers. Once he had read the Bible, Charles suffered “a chronic doubt of its truth,” its “strange statements,” and its scheme of redemption. Marshall pleaded with his brother to make an attempt at salvation, but Charles could not accept Jesus as savior even to save himself, as that would betray his conscience. He poured his heart out in an attempt to lift this “weighty restraint” that had existed so long between the two brothers. “I have gone beyond my warrant I am sure,” Charles admitted, “but when did I ever do otherwise?” His confession of disbelief was an admission that very few politicians or licensed attorneys could afford to make. Now that he was out of the public eye, Charles no longer pretended that he believed. He needed Marshall to know the truth while they both still lived.8

  The 1870s was an uncertain time for Anderson and his Kentucky neighbors. A financial panic in 1873 caused a loss of confidence and general deflation that lasted nearly six years. Despite these challenges, Anderson’s interests in iron mining and the rapid growth of the railroads meant that he fared better than most. The political winds changed direction in the 1876 presidential election. As Anderson watched from the sidelines, a seismic shift was taking place that would change the South dramatically. Southern states were back in the Union and President Grant’s administration was suffering from a corruption scandal. Southern Democrats were eager to expel the carpetbaggers and restore their agricultural economy to a system that more closely resembled the prewar period. They nominated New York governor Samuel J. Tilden as their candidate. Anderson was “grieved, shocked and stunned” at this result. It was not Tilden or the Democrats whom he opposed, but rather the way that the nominee’s henchmen bribed editors in Kentucky and purchased delegates at the convention. Now Tilden was pandering to the base prejudices of Southerners who wanted to divide the country once again “by the old slavery line.” He could not abide what he considered “the gangrene” of politics.9

  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

  AFTERWORD

  American Sacred Scripture Reconsidered

  PRESIDENT 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.