On this Day...
November 19
• In 1863, Lincoln made his Gettysburg Address on the battlefield where 7,000 Union and Confederate soldiers had been killed four months earlier. At the ceremony to dedicate the 17-acre site as a national cemetery the principal speaker was Senator Edward Everett. The president had only been invited two week before, but had worked hard on his speech and rewritten it five times. Everett’s address lasted two hours. Lincoln’s lasted three minutes. In it, he said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here” – but his closing words became the watchwords for democracy: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
• In 1862, mass conversion evangelist Billy Sunday was born in Ames, Iowa. He grew up an orphan and played pro baseball for eight years before he saw the light and quit to follow his calling. An estimated one billion people came to his 300 major revivals. He claimed that a total of a million souls “hit the sawdust trail” to salvation, and he picked up $1 million in “free will offerings along the way.” His hellfire preaching attacked socialism, scientists, higher education, and especially alcoholic drink – he was a leading popular prohibitionist. Describing himself as ‘the rube of rubes,” he performed gymnastics and acrobatics on stage, and in one sermon, would demonstrate a sinner trying to slip into heaven by sliding into “home plate” as “God the Umpire” called him out!
from Today’s The Day by Jeremy Beadle (Signet)