by Tim Black
A few minutes past 6 p.m., Abraham Lincoln’s train pulled into the station. Mr. Greene pointed out famed orator Edward Everett, the keynote speaker for the dedication ceremony at the National Cemetery, standing on the platform. He said, “Everett is waiting not only for the president, but for his daughter Charlotte Wise and her husband Captain Henry A. Wise of the United States Navy. They are on the train as well.”
A line of notables preceded President Lincoln’s appearance on the railroad station platform. Someone in the crowd began identifying Lincoln’s cabinet members by name for the audience, as well as the president’s two young personal secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay. And, then, finally, President Lincoln appeared, silk stovepipe hat atop his head.
He towered over everyone. He was taller than all of the other men to begin with, but with the hat atop his head, Abraham Lincoln walked through the crowd like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Victor thought the president’s eyes seemed tired. He seemed stressed out, for the poor man had seen so much of war during his brief term of office. Lincoln ritually shook dozens of the extended hands of the well-wishers. Victor marveled at how vulnerable Lincoln was walking among the people. There were no Secret Service agents watching out for him. Anyone could approach him and shoot him, Victor thought. It had never occurred to anyone that someone might actually shoot a president, until the day after the last performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater. Victor thought it was a wonder that Abraham Lincoln lived as long as he did. He remembered reading about the assassination plot that Mr. Pinkerton had uncovered before Lincoln’s inauguration only two years before. That was a close call. Victor listened as the president told a quick story to the crowd. He had a surprisingly high, nasally voice.
“A pair of women from Tennessee called on me the other day at the White House seeking the release of their husbands from one of our prisons. One of the ladies argued for the release of her husband because he was a deeply religious man.
“‘Madame,’ I said. ‘You say your husband is a religious man. Perhaps I am not a good judge of these things, but in my opinion the religion that makes men rebel and fight against a just government in defense of an unjust institution that makes slaves of men whom God made free is not the genuine article. The religion that reconciles men to the idea of eating their bread in the sweat of other men’s faces is not the kind to get to heaven on.’”
The crowd chuckled and clapped and Abraham Lincoln strode down Carlisle Street to the three-story Wills Mansion on the Diamond. The president said no more aloud that was audible, although Victor thought Lincoln seemed to be whispering something to his secretary, John Hay. Victor ran closer and listened, catching the tail end of the conversation:
“I need some time alone to polish my speech, John. I will have to leave the dinner early. Think up a plausible excuse for me without mentioning my tinkering with my address,” the president said with a wink and a smile. “Go ahead of me and see Mr. Wills and make sure my bedroom has a writing desk.”
The small crowd followed the president all the way to the doorstep to the Wills Mansion. At the front stoop of the house, President Lincoln turned and waved to the people in the street. “Please allow me to save my voice for tomorrow,” he said. “I would like to wish you all a good night.”
Someone in the crowd yelled “speech,” and the cry echoed from others until there was a chorus of “Speech! Speech!”
Lincoln smiled and put up his hand to hush the crowd. When there was silence he said, “I do not appear before you for the purpose of making a speech, yet for several substantial reasons. The most substantial of these is that I have no speech to make. In my position, it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things…”
To which a heckler interrupted with, “If you can help it!”
The president smiled and wittily replied, “It very often happens that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all.”
And with that retort, Abraham Lincoln uttered not another word and entered the Wills Mansion.
Victor watched as Lincoln walked into the house, followed by Edward Everett, Everett’s daughter and his son-in-law and members of the president’s cabinet. Word around town was that as many as twenty thousand people would attend the ceremony. While that was certainly a large amount, Victor thought, it was dwarfed by the number of unwanted visitors that the town received on those three days in July.
Chapter 18
The parade route to the dedication ceremony of the Soldiers National Cemetery began at the Diamond in the center of Gettysburg and proceeded up Baltimore Street to property adjacent to the Evergreen Cemetery, the town’s local graveyard. People were gathering and proceeding ahead of the parade, but Mr. Greene suggested that their little group wait and join the “tail enders.”
“Why, Mr. Greene?” Minerva asked.
“Well,” the teacher explained, “the last group in line, known as the ‘tail enders’ were the boys from Pennsylvania College who had enlisted in the Union army in June, forming a portion of the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Regiment, and had been discharged in time to resume their studies in the fall. The boys signed up to defend their college town, but of course the United States Army, in its wisdom, sent the boys elsewhere and they were not in Gettysburg when the battle began. Still, because of their service, a spot in front of the platform was reserved for them to stand. If we join them, we will be upfront to hear Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.”
“Good thinking,” Bruce Catton said.
“Yes, it is,” Henry Adams agreed.
“Someone is going to have to put me up on his shoulders,” Nikola Tesla said. “Otherwise I won’t be able to see over the taller folks.”
“You can sit on my shoulders, Mr. Tesla,” Victor offered.
“Good lad,” Shelby Foote commented, smiling at Victor.
The wait began. Group after group formed and proceeded up the street in an orderly fashion. So different than when the Rebels chased the Federals through the streets on July 1st, Victor thought, and the Union boys fled, running, toward the high ground of Cemetery Hill.
“The authorities only began reinterring the bodies of the Union soldiers about three weeks ago, due to the usual bureaucratic snafus. By mistake, a few Confederates were buried here.”
“What happened to the other Confederates, Mr. Greene?” Minerva asked.
“In the 1870s, Southern veterans’ groups were able to have over three thousand Confederate dead removed from the trenches on the battlefield and reinterred in Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, which you may remember was the capital of the Confederate States of America.”
“Second capital,” Shelby Foote corrected Mr. Greene. “The first capital was Montgomery, Alabama.”
“Yes,” Mr. Greene agreed. “But as soon as Virginia joined the Confederacy the capital was moved out of Montgomery. See that younger boy with the college boys, the boy who is limping, I believe that is Frederick Lehmann,” Greene said.
“Who?” Bette asked.
“He was a fifteen-year-old boy in the preparatory school at Pennsylvania College who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg. He was the youngest to fight, and John Burns was the oldest, fifteen to sixty-nine. Well, he was in his school clothes and firing a weapon on the first day out past the seminary and he could have been hanged as a bushwhacker after he was captured, but a Union officer pleaded for his life and the Confederates shooed him back to the college with a warning. He didn’t get the limp from the battle, however. Later a sniper shot him when his curiosity got the best of him and he went outside His wound didn’t heal as well as mine did,” Greene added. “He limped for the rest of his life.”
“He didn’t have antibiotics,” Minerva said with a frown.
The teacher blushed. “Look, there he is!”
“Lincoln!” Victor shouted.
The 16th president of the United States, iconic stovepipe hat atop his head, removed his lid and bowed to the assembled students.
&n
bsp; “Huzzah! Huzzah!” the Pennsylvania College students shouted.
Lincoln was accompanied by his two secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay.
“John Hay will go on to become Secretary of State,” Mr. Greene said, going into teacher mode. “Under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. He developed the Open Door Policy in China, of course he has no idea as to his destiny this day, or to the destiny of his beloved Father Abraham. As a matter of fact, Hay and Nicolay often accompanied Lincoln to the theater. Too bad they didn’t on the night he was shot. Maybe they might have stopped Booth. Who’s to say? Let’s see if Lincoln has graysocks. Carl Sandburg said he did.”
As Lincoln sat tall in the saddle, Victor saw that Sandburg, perhaps the greatest dead historian on the subject of Abraham Lincoln, was indeed correct.
“I see the gray socks!” Victor shouted, drawing odd looks from a few of the Pennsylvania College students.
There were choruses of cheers as people recognized Lincoln as he sat atop the horse, and once again he doffed his stovepipe hat to the multitude in response, not venturing to speak, preferring to save his voice for his later address. Victor and his classmates joined in another chorus of “Huzzahs!” that the college boys offered to the president.
But it was a somber procession, funereal in design, a slow slog to Cemetery Hill; at least that is what it seemed like to Victor, who really saw little of the procession once it turned onto Baltimore Street. Finally, it was the college boys’ turn to join the parade at the very end of the line, and many of the boys groused that they would be too far away from the speakers’ platform to either see or hear anything. Like “hitchhikers,” the little stickers that seemed to always hitch a ride on one’s trousers in Florida, Mr. Greene’s group slipped in among the college boys who were pleasantly surprised when they entered the cemetery and the crowd parted for the Pennsylvania College students, and they indeed wound up in the front ranks right before the speakers’ platform only a few yards away from the 16th president of the United States.
Standing in the front row a few feet from the speakers’ platform, even the diminutive Nikola Tesla could see the dignitaries on the dais and needed no boost upon anyone’s shoulders.
The keynote speaker was Edward Everett. As his students formed a huddle around their teacher, Mr. Greene whispered that the professors at Pennsylvania College were eager to hear Everett. “None of the professors thought Mr. Lincoln’s remarks would amount to much, as Everett, a famous orator, was the main attraction.”
“It was if Everett has descended from Mount Olympus for the occasion,” Catton added. “That’s what the professors thought.”
Victor was glad that no one in the crowd could hear Bruce Catton. He could be kind of a downer.
Edward Everett, the sixty-nine-year-old orator, former Whig senator, and vice-presidential candidate for the Constitutional Union Party in the 1860 election, stood beside a plain oak table and recited from memory the speech he had composed:
“Standing beneath this serene sky,” he began, “overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed; grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy…” and then Everett began the body of his oration…
“It was appointed by law in Athens, that the obsequies of the citizens who fell in battle should be performed at the public expense, and in the most honorable manner. Their bones were carefully gathered up from the funeral pyre, where their bodies were consumed, and brought home to the city. There, for three days before internment, they lay in state, beneath tents of honor, to receive the votive offerings of friends and relatives—flowers, weapons, precious ornaments, painted vases (wonders of art, which after two thousand years adorn the museums of modern Europe)—the last tributes of surviving affection. Ten coffins of funeral Cyprus received the honorable deposit, one for each of the tribes of the city, and an eleventh in memory of the unrecognized, but not therefore unhonored, dead, and of those whose remains could not be recovered. On the fourth day the mournful procession was formed; mothers, wives, sisters, daughters led the way, and to them it was permitted by the simplicity of ancient manner to utter aloud their lamentation for the beloved and the lost; the male relatives and friends of the deceased followed; citizens and strangers close the train. Thus marshaled, they moved to the place of internment in the famous Ceramicus, the most beautiful suburb of Athens…”
Victor listened, enraptured by the history lesson from the old man while, after twenty minutes, many of Everett’s listeners and some of the Pennsylvania College boys grew bored and restless. In fact, the long-winded Edward Everett, without consulting any notes, spoke for two hours, and by the end of his speech, at least a third of the audience had drifted off, seemingly more interested at viewing the nearby Union entrenchments from the battle.
After Everett took his listeners’ minds to Athens, the great orator then brought them back to the present and the purpose for which they were gathered: the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery. But then Everett took an oratorical side trip, reviewing the entire Civil War up until that point. Still, Victor, Minerva, Bette and Mr. Greene and the others of their group were mesmerized by the learned man, and listened in rapt attention while others with shorter attention spans wandered off. The departed college boys’ places in the sea of humanity were quickly filled by others, and when Everett finally completed his lengthy oration and the president was introduced, many of the Pennsylvania College boys had forfeited their choice listening locations.
Hatless, the long-legged Lincoln arose beside the orator’s table. He pulled a piece of paper from his coat pocket and began his address. Victor, only a few feet from the president, could see that the president had written his speech in pencil, and wondered if his speech was a last-minute attempt as Victor, a notorious procrastinator, often waited until the last hour to begin his high school homework. Was the president a procrastinator as well, or did he merely rewrite it?
“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln said, pausing for effect, before resuming.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” Again, Lincoln paused...
“But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.
“It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
As the president finished there was scattered applause as if the audience was uncertain that Lincoln had finished. After a moment, there was additional clapping, but the amount and duration of the applause did not rival the level of appreciation that Everett had received. The president turned to John Hay and Victor heard Lincoln say, “My address was a failure, John.”
*
John Burns, fully recove
red from his wounds, walked with his wife Barbara to the dedication cemetery of the Soldiers National Cemetery on Cemetery Hill. He was irritated that he hadn’t been given a prominent position in the parade, but David Wills and other members of the community had grown weary of the heroic stature of the self-serving John Burns. Most of the people in town had never liked the old man in the first place, and the fact that several newspapers had written stories that John Burns, “the hero of Gettysburg,” was the only Gettysburg civilian who had fought against the Rebels during the battle irritated the town’s residents. Halfway through Everett’s oration, a bored Burns and his wife left the ceremony and returned to their house on Chambersburg Street.
Attorney David Wills, who had invited Lincoln to attend the ceremonies, was surprised when the president said at the close of the ceremonies, “I wish to meet John Burns, David.”
Flustered, Wills looked at the students in the front row and asked, “It appears that Mr. Burns left the celebration. Would one of you go see old John Burns and bring him to my house? I’ll give you a dollar.”
“I’ll do it for nothing, sir,” Bette said.
“Do you know where he lives, Bette?” Mr. Greene asked.
“Mr. Foote showed me,” Bette replied.
Wills quickly scratched out a note for Bette to give to Burns. “My house is on the Diamond,” Wills said.
“I know sir,” Bette smiled.
“Need any help?” Victor asked Bette.
“No, Victor, I think I can handle this,” she replied. No, Mr. Bridges, she thought, her competitive juices flowing. I want something for myself, something that you can only envy. She did, however, give him a consolation prize, a kiss on his cheek.
Bette had compassion for John Burns’ early exit from the ceremony. She could see why Everett could bore a body. She became restless herself after an hour at the man’s verbosity, but she was not about to be the first of her group to walk away from the oration. When she arrived at the Burns’ house Bette climbed the outside stairs to the second floor and knocked on the door. She heard a man’s voice recounting his exploits, but a small woman, Mrs. Burns, answered the door, and putting a finger to her lips in a sign of shushing. She handed Barbara Burns the note from David Wills and the old woman quickly read it and nodded for Bette to enter. Burns, it seemed was just finishing up another rendition of his heroism to a group of out-of-own visitors. John Burns was at the moment, after the president, the most famous man in town.