Think you know about Lincoln and Gettysburg? Note on the Gettysburg Address by H.L. Mencken The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination;it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. Author Charles E. Gilbert, below, asserts that Lincoln’s “fame is far beyond the man’s deserts; his abilities exaggerated; his virtues magnified; his statesmanship overestimated; his one achievement misrepresented and misunderstood; conflictive in declaration, purpose and effect.” Bernhard Lincolns Revised Gettysburg Address General Donn Piatt, who traveled with Lincoln during his campaign and knew Lincoln perhaps as well as any man: When a leader dies all good men go to lying about him. Abraham Lincoln has almost disappeared from human knowledge. I hear of him, I read of him in eulogies and biographies, but fail to recognize the man I knew in life . . . Lincoln faced and lived through the awful responsibility of war with a courage that came from indifference. Ward Lamon, intimate friend of Lincoln and his United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, and Colonel in the Secret Service; Historian Shepherd of Baltimore; W.H. Cunningham of the Montgomery (Missouri) Star, who sat right behind Lincoln at Gettysburg, all agreed and publicly stated that the speech published was not the one delivered by Lincoln; that both Edward Everett and Seward expressed their disappointment and there was no applause; that Lincoln said: Lamon, that speech was like a wet blanket on the audience. I am distressed by it. These gentlemen who heard the speech all say that the speech delivered was not the one which has been so extensively printed. Even [Lincoln secretary John] Nicolay says: It was revised. William H. Herndon, under whom Lincoln began his law practice and longtime friend, wrote one of the first biographies of Lincoln, Story of a Great Life, but because of its frankness in unfolding the life of Lincoln it was bought up and suppressed. It was republished some years later, much modified . . . Lamon, in his Life of Lincoln, said: The ceremony of Mr. Lincolns apotheosis was planned and executed after his death by men who were unfriendly to him while he lived. Men who had exhausted the resources of their skill and ingenuity in venomous distractions of the living Lincoln were first after his death to undertake the task of guarding his memory, not as a human being, but as a god. After his death it became a political necessity to pose him as the greatest, wisest, Godliest man that ever lived.” Among those participating in the apotheosis Lamon names Seward, Edwin Stanton, Thad Stevens and Charles Sumner.” (Two Presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Charles E. Gilbert, The Naylor Company, 1973, pp. 78-79)
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 23:21:00 +0000
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