The Other Gettysburg Addresses

Seven score and ten years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered a Gettysburg Address he thought the world would little note nor long remember.

The President's prediction could not have been more inaccurate; his 272-word speech reverberates through American political rhetoric endlessly as his stature casts the most difficult shadow in which any speaker can tread.

While nearly every president has visited Gettysburg, only a handful of Presidents have spoken at the hallowed ground.

With Lincoln’s scribe John Hay as his Secretary of State, Theodore Roosevelt appropriately became the first president bold enough to follow Lincoln’s remarks.

In the Soldier’s National Cemetery on Memorial Day 1904, Roosevelt tied Lincoln to the current struggle for the expansion of civil rights and national supremacy of law.

Roosevelt called the Civil War “a great war for righteousness; a war waged for the noblest ideals, but waged also in thoroughgoing, practical fashion.” 

When Roosevelt summarized the battle, he connected soldiers’ sacrifices for a cause to an audience mostly too young to remember Gettysburg. 

He revered Lincoln’s words not only for voicing ideals but compelling a country to act upon them. He evoked Lincoln’s spirit without trying to mimic his speech.

Delivering a transcript to a journalist of a speech to be given at Lincoln’s birthplace in 1909, Teddy Roosevelt wrote of his desire to avoid direct comparison:

Thank Heaven that it can not be printed beside the Gettysburg address. A speech may be a pretty good speech of the hour, or of the day, or even of the year, and yet be ruined if put side by side with one of the two or three great classics of human eloquence—of that eloquence which shows forth its human soul.

However, Roosevelt fearlessly evoked Lincoln for political gain. Running for a third term as president, he spoke softly at a campaign luncheon on Memorial Day 1912 at the battlefield but used Lincoln as a big stick.

His speech mostly marveled at national unity between the North and the South as he divided the Republican Party and sought to build a Progressive coalition with southern Democrats. However, Roosevelt ricocheted questions about his imperialistic policies and unprecedented pursuit of a third-term by reminding reporters that Lincoln had been described as a dictator in his time.

Wilson beat Roosevelt in the 1912 election but he echoed the Bull Moose’s sentiments about unity at a July 4, 1913 reunion.

Fifty years after the battle, before the first audience of Union and Confederate veterans assembled at Gettysburg, Wilson opens with a promise: “I need not tell you what the Battle of Gettysburg meant.” He delivers a cloud of fine words (“splendid valor,” “manly devotion,” “benign and majestic”) and makes no mention of Lincoln or the cause for which the soldiers fought. Wilson simply asks to commit a wartime spirit to times of peace, because “War fitted us for action, and action never ceases.” Only a little more than a year later, the world will remind Wilson that words of peace do not always cause war to cease.

When war came, Roosevelt would describe Woodrow Wilson as “unmanly,” comparing him unfavorably to Washington and Lincoln, who he said did not escape action by hiding “behind clouds of fine words.” 

Like his distant cousin, Franklin Roosevelt spoke twice at Gettysburg. During his first visit in 1934, his campaign speech would not mention Lincoln until his closing putting him alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Wilson.

More famously, as President, FDR spoke at the Eternal Peace Light dedication on July 3, 1938, unveiling a monument to “men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray.” He noted that we turn to the Civil War and Lincoln because “the fundamental conflict which events forced upon his Presidency invite us ever to turn to him for help.”

Foreshadowing the future conflict in Europe, Roosevelt told his audience Lincoln’s greatness came from understanding that sometimes “a fight must be fought through to a decision so clear that it is accepted as being beyond recall.”

However, the most surreal and haunting decision surrounding presidential speeches at Gettysburg involved Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Eisenhower.

That year on Memorial Day, Vice President Lyndon Johnson spoke at Gettysburg, connecting the Civil War to the fight for civil rights. He solemnly said the “heroic deeds” at Gettysburg should encourage freed men to persevere. He called to the country’s conscience, remarking, “Our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.” 

Just as the North and South had united, Johnson urged that Americans to listen to "the voice of those who died here and the great man who spoke here" to come together to fulfill emancipation as fact rather than just proclamation.

That following fall, President Eisenhower, the first soldier turned president since Colonel Teddy Roosevelt, became the last president to speak at Gettysburg, where he had been living in retirement:

We read Lincoln's sentiments, we ponder his words - the beauty of the sentiments he expressed enthralls us; the majesty of the words holds us spellbound - but we have not paid to his message its just tribute until we - ourselves - live it. For well he knew that to live for country is a duty, as demanding as is the readiness to die for it.

No matter how eloquently delivered, horrific actions days later overshadowed Eisenhower’s speech in the cemetery on November 19, 1963.

Though he had visited Gettysburg that year in March, President Kennedy declined park service guide an invitation to speak at the 100^th anniversary of the speech. He sent this note as he settled a political dispute in Dallas:

Let us remember those thousands of American patriots whose graves at home, beneath the sea and in distant lands are silent sentries of our heritage.

With clear parallels to Lincoln’s tragedy, Jacqueline Kennedy requested to consecrate her husband’s gravesite with an eternal flame in Arlington modeled after the Gettysburg monument he visited with his family.

Jerry Bennett's Days of Uncertainty and Dread

Jerry Bennett's Days of Uncertainty and Dread

More PowerPoint presentations from Andrew Small

The Battle of Gettysburg

John Brown's Raid

 

"I just feel like marching, always, when that tune is played." 

-President Abraham Lincoln

John Brown's Harper's Ferry raid was a watershed moment in defining the limitations of inalienable rights after the American Revolution. While the cultural, religious, and economic differences heighten tensions in the relationships between the North and South, Brown's raid becomes an exemplary embodiment of the ideological and regional struggle. Brown's martyrdom represents the realization of the hopes of the North and the fears of South. Brown's paradoxical “patriotic treason” highlights a cognitive dissonance between the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Brown's raid highlights the ideological inconsistency in both regions' irrational response of violence, which heightens the distrust that brings about the American Civil War.

"When I hear music, I fear no danger.

I am invulnerable. I see no foe.

I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest."

-Henry David Thoreau

While Northerners had condemned slavery, declaring it a threat to Union and a sin against humanity, John Brown's armed insurrection declared black liberation as an inalienable right. Brown argued he was compelled by the law of God to eliminate the sin of slavery. While many abolitionists saw slavery's extinction as necessary, they could not envision the means to achieve this goal without infringing upon state sovereignty protected by the Constitution.

"I do not think this army could survive without music."

-General Robert E. Lee

John Brown's vision of a utopian society provides a clear foil to Northern ambivalence towards the question of slavery. His constitution reflects his individual interpretation of the role government ought to play in society. His Provisional Constitution for the state of Virginia ambitiously asserts the priority of individual and human rights over state sovereignty. Brown asserts the ability to confiscate property from slaveholders and enforce religious doctrines. He envisioned an ideal society where all property is held common between those he deems qualified for membership (68).

"I know only two tunes. 
One of them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't." 
-General Ulysses S. Grant

In the pursuit of these religious and moral ideals, John Brown was adamant about his right to self defense in response to the violent forces that maintain slavery. He argued that he did not wish to overthrow the United States government violently but was asserting his right to bear arms in order to protect the inalienable rights of the slaves he sought to free. Brown objected to the argument that the struggle against slavery was a struggle against the United States. He claims he sought the nation's salvation, not its destruction. Slaveholders were traitors, not freedom fighters. Brown argues only through armed resistance will “the desired end may be effectually secured by the means proposed; namely, the enjoyment of our inalienable rights”(22).

"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees..." 

-General Stonewall Jackson

The raid revealed divisions within the North over these violent means to eliminate slavery in the South. The Democratic New Hampshire Patriot argued that the raid “shall serve to recall the public mind from prejudice and excitement to a clear and honest consideration of the dangerous tendencies of pernicious doctrines.” The paper questioned whether the violence at Harper's Ferry was a “fair and natural consequence” of black republicans' rhetoric in response to the events in Kansas. They attacked William Seward's assertion that the economies of the North and South were incompatible because they were dictated by a “doctrine of 'irrepressible conflict'” as the most troubling “sum and substance of their political faith” (107). John Brown's massive business failures and family fatalities could arguably be attributed to the effect slavery had on free labor. Seward's Republican nomination opponent, Abraham Lincoln, later argued that the effects slavery had in stoking problems in interstate commerce and domestic tranquility that required the use of force, fulfilling the promise of the Declaration without subverting the Constitution.

"To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up."  

- General George Meade

The Albany, New York, Evening Journal article “From the Philadelphia Press,” argues that “whatever sympathy the fate of John Brown awakens, will be occasioned by his bearing through an ordeal so trying, rather than any complicity of feeling in his lawless enterprise” (109). While the majority of the North is unwilling to endorse Brown's methods, Henry David Thoreau argues Brown's “commitment to justice and equality” forced him to use civil disobedience to act upon his own conscience (111). He criticizes newspaper editors that characterize Brown as “insane” or acting out of “revenge” against the South. Thoreau pleas not for Brown's life but rather his “immortal soul,” arguing that the North will not have their revenge until slavery is no more.

Arguing against the insanity defense, Brown cites the Golden Rule as justification for his actions at trial. He cites the Bible stating “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them,” even if he must forfeit his life to “mingle my blood...of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicket, cruel, and unjust enactments (87). Brown's prophecies affirmed the South's greatest fear: bloody conflict.

Southern fears of revenge weighed heavily on Governor Henry Wise's decision to approve the Virginia jury's conviction Brown of treason, murder and inciting a slave insurrection against Virginia, sentencing Brown to death. Having earned respect for Brown's eloquent defense, he was left with the decision of either declaring Brown insane and commuting Brown's sentence or going forward with Brown's execution, making him a martyr. 

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.  

War is hell."

-General William Tecumseh Sherman 

Arguments about state sovereignty rang hollow to Northerners who watched slave owners willingly invade free states, calling on the federal government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision. The federal government's relinquishing of power in the Brown trial, despite the fact that the raid was on a federal armory and was enforced by the Marines, undermined states rights arguments from the South. The Mason Report investigating the suppliers of money, guns, and ammunition attempted to use federal powers to implicate Republicans.

"I have always thought 'Dixie' one of the best tunes I have ever heard. That tune is now federal property and it is good to show the rebels that with us in power, they will be free to hear it again."

-President Abraham Lincoln

The Petersburg (Virginia) Express called the raid “The Harper's Ferry Conspiracy” and implicated Republicans with sowing seeds of rebellion against the South through their thefts of slave property. Security and Southern state sovereignty became a call to arms in prevention of an abolitionist invasion (108). These pressures force a conviction for Wise because despite “general appeal of sympathizers with the crimes” he could not pardon Brown's acts “without exciting bad men to action of rescue or revenge”(129).

Henry David Thoreau condemned popular sovereignty as the judgment of sanity. 

He asked, 

“How then can they print truth? If we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to us. And so they do like some traveling auctioneers, who sing an obscene song in order to draw a crowd around them”(116). 

Like music, in the triad of inalienable rights—life, liberty, and property—we can determine the quality of relationships as major or minor according to what we consider “home” but everyone only needs to hear that one inconsistent note for Americans to feel the dissonance.

‎"The nation which indulges toward another a habitual hatred or habitual fondness is in some degree a slave..."

-President George Washington, Farewell Address

Works Cited
John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry: A Brief History with Documents- Jonathan Earle