GettysBlog

Prologue

Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery and to consecrate hallowed ground.

In the course of three days many thousands had died there and the surrounding countryside had been transformed into a blighted landscape of death and destruction. Though we can view images of the battle's aftermath, the devastation is beyond the realm of our imaginations. One does not even want to think how bad the smell was. There was great need for a cemetery.

And a greater need for healing and recovery and restoration.

Garry Wills tells us Lincoln came to Gettysburg four months later "to sweeten the air." We are about to explore how Lincoln "transformed the ugly reality into something rich and strange" with his 272 word speech. Lincoln would eulogize and memorialize the dead and tell a disheartened country why it was fitting and proper to keep fighting a war that was inflicting so much pain and suffering.

If Gettysburg the battle was a sobering reminder of what the cost of preserving the Union and the cost of freedom and equality were to be, then Gettysburg the address was transcedent. As Wills proclaims, "The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration." (p. 20)

[Image of the Gettysburg Cemetery is from the brighterworlds flickr site.]

"In great deeds, something abides."

These are the words of Joshua Chamberlain, the Union hero who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for the defense of Little Round Top on the second day of fighting at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. His story is featured in the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara and in the film Gettysburg that was based on this book.

It is fitting that we think of him on this anniversary of his deeds. After Gettysburg he went on to become one of the war's most extraordinary soldiers and later the Governor of Maine. But I would like to focus on his other profession today. Prior to the war he had been a professor of Rhetoric at Bowdoin College. (He could read in seven foreign languages: Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac.) After the war he returned to Bowdoin to teach and to become its president.

In his excellent book, Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg, James McPherson tells of Chamberlain's return to Gettysburg in 1886 to dedicate a monument for his Twentieth Maine regiment. Let us read more of Chamberlain's speech and his rhetoric:

"In great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate the ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them...." 

Done for us.

[Image: Little Round Top, 1863. It is from the Library of Congress Selected Civil War Photographs collection.]