The Visitor Center at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, provides thought-provoking insight into Abraham Lincoln via his most famous speech.
Gettysburg: The battle that no-one wanted
The coachloads pulling up outside Gettysburg’s Visitor Center really shouldn’t be there. The Battle of Gettysburg – the biggest single bloodbath in American history – wasn’t desired by either side. Yet between the 1st and 3rd of July, 1863, two armies intent on tiptoeing round each other were cornered into fighting the deadliest skirmish of the American Civil War.
Visiting Gettysburg
Today, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is a town of battlefield tours, graveyards and monuments; the place where Civil War buffs and schoolchildren come to understand why north and south fought over the expansion of slavery into the West. It was a war of politics and ideology; a war over that most American concept – freedom – and who it applied to.
And caught in the maelstrom was one man who is associated with Gettysburg more than any other: Abraham Lincoln.
Steven Spielberg’s ploddingly worthy Oscar-bait biopic, Lincoln, saw Daniel Day-Lewis pick up a third gold statuette. And Gettysburg is the place where you can get an idea of how accurate that portrayal was.
The Gettysburg Address in November 1863
Despite the bloodshed, the Pennsylvania town is arguably best known as a place of words rather than deeds. 272 words, to be precise, which were delivered at the consecration of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in November 1863.
Lincoln wasn’t even billed as the main speaker that day – he was just asked to add something on a solemn occasion. What he came out with was the Gettysburg address – one of the most memorable, most stirring speeches in history. It was rooted in principles – the “proposition that all men are created equal”, that “these dead shall not have died in vain” and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Inside the Gettysburg Visitor Center
Inside the vast Visitor Center, the address is played on a loop. It’s almost impossible not to well up whilst listening to it, but it doesn’t conform to the Hollywood power speech stereotypes. One thing that strikes home is how un-strident Lincoln was. He had a gentle, reedy, bumpkin-ish voice – something captured wonderfully by Day-Lewis in the film – that somehow managed to convey a message more powerfully than those of booming orators.
This wasn’t the universal opinion at the time, however. Reading the newspaper coverage of the speech is a real eye-opener. The Chicago Times, for example, said: “The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery remarks.”
Learning about Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg
The Visitor Center does a far better job than Spielberg of conveying Lincoln’s calculating, wily nature. He was a quiet wrangler – something of a Machiavellian plate-spinner who was prepared to make pragmatic compromises and not be entirely truthful in search of a greater goal. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 is a classic example – it declared the slaves in Confederate territory free, but not those in the four Union slave states or Union-occupied territory a. It was a way of getting extra manpower – those southern slaves prepared to desert their owners – for the Union Army whilst not losing existing support.
A complex picture emerges of a man who was not a striding colossus, but a shrewd string-puller. Manipulation, not might, was his game.
It’s a complexity that the proud statues and solemn memorials looking out over acres of battlefields will never manage to convey. But, for an America that venerates Lincoln as its finest president, the lesson that right and wrong cannot always be so cleanly defined is one that a visit to Gettysburg teaches beautifully well.
More Pennsylvania travel
For a better idea of what happened at Gettysburg, it’s worth considering a guided tour.
Other Pennsylvania articles on Planet Whitley review Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Museum and discover the birthplace of the oil industry.
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