Gettysburg Address offers nation timeless lessons
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — In the days that followed Abraham Lincoln’s 272-word speech to thousands of onlookers in this small Pennsylvania farm town, few newspapers in the country immediately reported on the speech.
When they did, explains historian Michael Kraus, it was mostly dour examination filled with misquotes of the 16th president’s words.
“There were a lot of mistakes in those first reports. Words weren’t heard well. Order was mixed up. The speech didn’t appear in every newspaper the next day, or the next day, or the next day,” Kraus said from his artifact-filled basement office at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum in Pittsburgh, where he serves as the curator.
When it finally did, the reviews were sharply critical. “A paper in Boston ripped it to shreds; so did other papers across the North,” said Kraus.
Even the local Harrisburg paper, the Harrisburg Patriot and Union, dismissed it as mindless gibberish.
In truth, it took decades for anyone to think much of the speech, or even think of it at all.
“It wasn’t until well over a quarter-century later that it began to emerge in the American psyche across the country that this speech was more than a speech; it defined who we were for eternity,” said Kraus days before last week’s 155th anniversary of a speech that took less than two minutes to give and nearly 100 years to reach the reverence it holds today.
It is a lesson in understanding the effects of time. Time doesn’t always erode and bury the past. Sometimes it helps us better appreciate what was long right in front of us.
What a loss our country and our souls would have suffered had the Gettysburg Address been lost to the criticisms, the subsequent brutal battles that followed what happened in the city, the shock of the president’s violent death and the chaos of Reconstruction.
It is a speech that defines us, just as this battlefield defines us: The former reminds us to endure; the latter reminds us to never repeat.
In an era where deep political divisions fill our social media feeds, our cable news reports and nearly every aspect of our culture, it is heartening to make the bend on Baltimore Pike and find hundreds and hundreds of young families crowding into the Gettysburg National Park Military Museum.
Aditi Varma was waiting in the massive lobby of the museum with her two children, son Raghav and daughter Alahaead, while her husband, Mudit, bought the tickets for the family to enjoy the museum and a guided battlefield tour.
“Our son really is interested in American history,” Varma says. “He is studying the Civil War, and he really wanted to come here.” The Varma family, who were all born in India, now live in Princeton Junction, N.J., and had just made the first half of a six-hour round trip for a day at the national park.
The Renner-Grady-Deal family has deep ties here: Five sets of grandfathers fought in the battle, including Samuel Grady, whose great-great-grandson and namesake, 7-year-old Sam Grady, from Bethesda, Md., was there with his parents and grandparents and cousins.
“Sometimes when you are in the moment of something great, especially one that would steer the course of the country, it’s hard to understand the bigness of what’s really happening,” said Sarah Grady, Sam’s mom.
Last weekend, the park marked the 155th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address with a long weekend of parades, a reading of the speech and a solemn yet breathtaking commemoration at the cemetery, where luminary candles light each of the 3,512 Civil War soldiers’ graves as their names are read beginning at dusk.