The Parallel Lives

On June 28, 1863, Robert E. Lee, Confederate General, dared to cross the border and invade Pennsylvania, a Union state. Lee hoped to force Lincoln into negotiations to end the war.

     Lincoln felt dismayed. He understood that Union troops must repel Lee’s advance.

     On the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of July, a horrific battle unfolded, involving tens of thousands of troops that fought, clawed, and struggled at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Neither side defeated the other, but Union troops withstood Pickett’s charge up to Cemetery Ridge on the last day. 

     Lee was forced to withdraw, to head south. For a week after, Lincoln urged the Union General, George Meade, to attack Lee a fourth day, who was trapped because of a flooded Potomac River, but because Meade refused, the war drug on for almost two more years.

     What to do with the dead? The historian Garry Wills wrote in his account, “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America,” “Gettysburg, a town of only 2,500 inhabitants, was one make-shift burial ground, fetid and steaming.”

     At least 5000 dead and rotting horses and mules lay in and around the town, plus 7058 dead human beings: 3155 Union soldiers and 3903 Confederate soldiers.   

     Fire consumed the horses, but the dead soldiers were covered with a thin blanket of earth. Upright boards standing beside each mound identified the names of each Union body.

    A prominent Gettysburg resident named David Wills formed an interstate commission to collect funds to purchase seventeen acres of land near Gettysburg for a cemetery, to find and hire an architect to design a cemetery there, and to hire a team to rebury the dead into that cemetery.

     Wills hired an architect named William Saunders, who designed a cemetery composed of a series of semicircles that ascended an incline, so that each plot was neither greater or lesser in value to any other plot. The work of reburying the dead into that new cemetery began. 

     By the fall of 1863, officials of the interstate commission began to form plans for a dedication ceremony. Wills extended offers to others, but it was the renowned orator Edward Everett who agreed to speak. President Abraham Lincoln agreed to say a few Dedicatory Remarks.  

     On Thursday, November 19, 1863, Edward Everett spoke for two hours, Lincoln for two minutes. Lincoln said only 272 words, divided into ten sentences and three paragraphs.

     The seventh sentence resonates still today. “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

     Consider how Lincoln contrasted two words, “say” and “did.” He and his fellow officials can “say” a massive number of words at a dedication ceremony, but it is what the Northern soldiers “did” that is of greater importance. They “gave their lives that that nation might live.”

    Consider also in that sentence how Lincoln introduces memory into his text, when he contrasts the word “remember” to “forget.”

     The word “note” refers to jotting words onto paper, so as to not forget, but to remember.

     Lincoln concluded his Remarks. “[W]e here highly resolve that the dead shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

     Memorial Day approaches. We cannot forget. We remember. We have our notes. We reflect upon our hard-fought-for freedoms that Lincoln insisted “shall not perish from the earth.”