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
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.
APPENDIX
Charles Anderson’s Gettysburg Address
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.
How is it then, my fellow countrymen, that those saddening spectacles do not, at this time and place, oppress with dismay, the heart of some lonely traveler in a wilderness of ruin? Why is it that this face of Nature is now all radiant with the smile of peace and that these happy homes of farm and village are yet instinct with human lives and their loves and hopes? The answer must come from the mute lips beneath us. Our reasons and consciences shall interpret their dumb replies.
“We have died, that you may live. We have
toiled and fought—have been wounded and
suffered in keenest agonies even unto
death, that
you might live;—live in quietude, prosperity
and in freedom. Oh! Let not such sufferings and
deaths be endured in vain. Oh! Let not such
lives and privileges be enjoyed in ungrateful
apathy towards their benefactors! Remember us, in
our fresh and bloody graves,—as you are standing
upon them. And let your latest posterity learn
the value of the issues in that Battlefield and the
cost of this sacrifice beneath its sod!”
But now, my friends, (speaking again with ourselves, the alive to the living,) as you once more turn your eyes and thoughts upon the surrounding scene in its present real condition of Nature un-marred and Art undestroyed, do you, like the curious traveler in St. Paul’s, inquire, for the monuments of these fallen heroes; Look around you. Behold this smiling landscape! See these happy homes!
It would be, however, a very imperfect estimate of the services and the victory of these Dead, if we should limit our contemplations to their local and visible results. It will be a delicate task, I know, fitting to expose on this occasion, the causes and ends of this Rebellion. This is a civil War, in present progress. And the usage in like ceremonials is so to speak of the Dead, as not to wound, or even to offend the Living. Nevertheless, my fellow Countrymen, the Dead must have justice, at their own graves as in all history, even though the living actors may seem to lack our charity, and ourselves to be wanting in an over-refinement of taste. Our true course, therefore, will be first of all things, to speak the truth and the whole truth. We should speak and adjudge, indeed, wholly without partisanship. But, we must perform these duties without the cowardice, of fearing that our Catholic truths shall be miscalled, politics. In order, rightly, to read and record the merits of these Dead, we are compelled, truly and fully to consider the nature and the ends of that great War, of which this Battle and these Deaths, were the incidents and consequences. If we are capable of this simple duty, then shall we all, with the mind’s eyes, see in the results of that sacrifice, monuments to their memories, as much grander and more enduring than all these living scenes, which Treason has been compelled thus to leave standing, or than any future structures of marble, or bronze, which Patriotism may freely rear, as great moral principles are more worthy and more durable than any material things are, or ever can be.
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