Anniversary special feature

When it comes to the Gettysburg Address, even trivia can be important

By James M. Cornelius

[November 19, 2013]  SPRINGFIELD — Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered 150 years ago on Nov. 19, 1863, has become part of our historical literature. First spoken at a new cemetery in that old Pennsylvania village, it has been reproduced on hundreds of thousands of souvenir papers, T-shirts, bronze plaques and marble walls. It is a part of schoolkids' culture, of aspiring immigrants' thoughts and of veterans' remembrances.

There are also scores of teeny-tiny facts about Lincoln himself that day, and about the speech, that fascinate people today.

Who were the other 36 people sleeping in Judge Wills' house on the square that night? Did Lincoln give a watch to your great-great-grandpa on the train to Pennsylvania? What was the name of the president's horse in the procession? Is my fake parchment copy of it the real thing?

Please do not scoff -- individuals care about these details because hundreds of millions of people care about the epochal events: the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 that killed more than 7,800 men, and the speech of 272 words that set this nation on a path toward resolution. If you are serious about a subject, then you are probably serious about some of its sidelights.

Lincoln himself cared about the tiniest of nuances. That is why in the course of drafting his five manuscripts of the address, he kept altering words:

• Good: "upon"
  Better: "on"

• Good: "propriety"
  Better: "fitting and proper"

• Good: "to stand here"
  Better: "here be dedicated"

• Good: "shall have a new birth"
  Better: "under God, shall have a new birth"

Some things sound better when spoken; some things read better when written. Some principles need italicizing with the human voice. All things bear improvement. Lincoln the tinkerer, the lawyer, the politician, the commander, the president, knew that. Most of all, he knew that this nation needed a "new birth" to make itself better.

The myths surrounding the Gettysburg Address are few and unimportant. His invitation to speak was not a late after-thought. He did not write any of the speech on an envelope. He did not write any of it on the train. He did not think it a failure.

Indeed, the facts are bigger and better than the myths: He began thinking about his message just four days after the battles of July; he polished it up the night before the speech, in the presence of William Johnson, a black man; he was ill with smallpox for several days afterward and might have been feeling poorly by Nov. 18. But Lincoln was not skipping the trip on his own account; he was certainly going to Gettysburg, once the family doctor assured him and Mary that their 10-year-old boy Tad would recover from his own bout of smallpox.

So, is it trivial that William Johnson was in the room? Not if you imagine that Lincoln had that one person in mind while he was writing to ensure the freedom of 4 million other African-Americans; writing to steel the nation's resolve to fight on and preserve the Union; writing because "these dead shall not have died in vain."

In our freedom, we can look up the trivial, but we must prize the big picture. All of Lincoln's efforts have proved triumphant, thanks to more soldiers and citizens and citizens-to-be than he could ever have imagined.

[By JAMES CORNELIUS, Ph.D. Text from Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum file received from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency]

Cornelius is curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. To learn more about the Gettysburg Address and the presidential library’s anniversary celebration, visit www.GettysburgAddress150.com.