A Day with Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863
You Are There: A Graphic History Series
You Are There… The Graphic History Guide.
Historical Backdrop
On July 1–3, 1863, the small crossroads town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, became the site of the bloodiest battle in the American Civil War, leaving more than 50,000 men killed, wounded, or missing across its fields and ridgelines. Four and a half months later, the dead were still being dug up from shallow battlefield graves and reinterred in a new Soldiers’ National Cemetery on the hill above town. President Abraham Lincoln was invited — almost as an afterthought — to offer “a few appropriate remarks” at the cemetery’s dedication on November 19, 1863. The featured speaker was Edward Everett, the most celebrated orator in America, who would deliver a two-hour address from memory. Lincoln was fifty-four years old, gaunt and hollowed out by two years of catastrophic war and the death of his eleven-year-old son Willie. He had written a short speech of roughly 272 words on a piece of lined paper. Unknown to anyone around him, he was also developing a case of smallpox that would put him in bed for weeks after his return to Washington. The town he was riding into still smelled of death.
November 18, 1863, 5:35 PM — Gettysburg Railroad Depot, Carlisle Street, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
You unfold yourself from the low doorway of the passenger car and step down onto the rough wooden platform at Gettysburg’s small depot, and the first thing that reaches you is the smell — a faint, sweet rot drifting from the fields south and west of town, the residue of fifty thousand casualties that four months of weather have not entirely erased. The crowd on the platform, maybe two hundred people, falls quiet and stares up at you, some removing their hats, a few women pressing handkerchiefs to their mouths — whether from the smell or from emotion you cannot tell. Your long black frock coat is wrinkled from five hours on the train. Your stovepipe hat puts your height well above seven feet, and you have to stoop slightly to clear the depot’s overhang. David Wills, the local attorney who organized this event, steps forward to shake your large, rough hand and lead you through the muddy streets to his home on the town square. Behind you, Seward lights a cigar and Lamon scans the crowd with his hand inside his coat.
November 18, 1863, 7:45 PM — Second-Floor Bedroom, Wills House, York Street (the Diamond), Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
You sit at a small walnut writing desk in the corner of the upstairs bedroom David Wills has given you, your knees almost touching the underside of the desk because no one in Gettysburg built furniture for a man your size. A single oil lamp throws a warm circle of light across a sheet of lined paper covered in your angular, rightward-slanting handwriting. The steel nib pen rests between your index and middle fingers, a small blot of ink staining your thumb. Through the floorboards, you hear the low murmur of dinner guests — Everett, Seward, the governors of several states, cabinet officers — all gathered at Wills’s table below. You have declined to join them yet. You stare at what you have written so far and mouth a phrase silently, testing its rhythm. “Four score and seven years ago.” Your lips move but no sound emerges. Through the window, a brass band is warming up somewhere on the square, and the sound of boots on cobblestones and the smell of woodsmoke drift in through the gap in the sash. The paper before you has cross-outs and insertions. You dip the nib again and write.
November 18, 1863, 9:50 PM — Front Door of the Wills House, the Diamond, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
