Thousands gather for event marking 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

GETTYSBURG, Pa. – On the Civil War battlefield where President Abraham Lincoln gave a speech that symbolized his presidency and the sacrifices made by Union and Confederate forces, thousands gathered Tuesday to ponder what the Gettysburg Address has meant to the nation.

The inspirational and famously short Gettysburg Address was praised for reinvigorating national ideals of freedom, liberty and justice amid a Civil War that had torn the country into pieces over slavery.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — first delivered here nearly five months after the major 1863 battle that left tens of thousands of men wounded, dead or missing — was being read by a re-enactor to mark the 150th anniversary of the speech.

The short oration, which begins, “Four score and seven years ago,” was intended to mark the dedication of the cemetery at the site of the pivotal battle. But it also came as Lincoln’s own reasons for fighting the Civil War were evolving. He spoke of how democracy itself rested upon “the proposition that all men are created equal,” a profound and politically risky statement for the time. Slavery and the doctrine of individual states’ rights that had protected it would not hold in the “more perfect union” of Lincoln’s vision.

The speech has become as absorbed in American culture as the national anthem and Declaration of Independence, memorized by countless schoolchildren over the decades, even though no definitive edition exists.

“President Lincoln sought to heal a nation’s wounds by defining what a nation should be,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, calling Lincoln’s words superb, his faith deep and his genius profound. “Lincoln wrote his words on paper, but he also inscribed them in our hearts.”

Echoing Lincoln, keynote speaker and Civil War historian James McPherson said the president took the dais in November 1863 at a time when it looked like the nation “might indeed perish from the earth.”

“The Battle of Gettysburg became the hinge of fate on which turned the destiny of that nation and its new birth of freedom,” McPherson.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia administered the oath of allegiance to a group of 16 immigrants, telling them the national identity is unique, illustrated by the people’s “fidelity to certain political principles.”

In the July 1863 battle, considered the turning point of the war, federal forces turned back a Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s speech was delivered more than four months later, at the dedication of a national cemetery to bury the battle’s casualties.

Though celebrated now, it was not immediately recognized as a towering literary achievement.

Just last week The Patriot-News in nearby Harrisburg retracted a dismissive editorial about the speech published by its Civil War-era predecessor, The Harrisburg Patriot & Union. The paper now says it regrets the error of not seeing its “momentous importance, timeless eloquence and lasting significance.”

The ideals expressed in the speech also weren’t necessarily a reflection of reality. Only a few years after the war, a separate cemetery for black Civil War veterans was created in Gettysburg because they were “denied burial in the National Cemetery because of segregation policies,” according to a historical marker placed in 2003.

The anniversary ceremony began with a wreath-laying event at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. A graveside salute to U.S. Colored Troops was held, and a tree-planting ceremony was planned in the afternoon.

Among many re-enactors on the grounds were at least two Abraham Lincolns, including one who recited the address.

“Lincoln would have been surprised by the reverence accorded to him by future generations,” McPherson said.

He said the Gettysburg Address, despite its brevity, managed to weave together themes of past, present and future; continent, nation and battlefield; and birth, death and rebirth.

“Men died that the nation might live,” McPherson said. “Yet the old nation also died,” and with it, a system of bondage that enslaved some 4 million Americans.

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Scolforo reported from Harrisburg.