Most people who visit the Gettysburg National Cemetery walk up to a monument, read the plaque, and assume that’s where Lincoln stood when he gave the Gettysburg Address. I did too, honestly…until I found out that monument marks the wrong spot.
For years, the story was that Lincoln stood right there, in the National Cemetery, looking out over the rows of Union dead. It’s on the plaque. It’s in older books about the battle.
It’s just not true.
That’s why we made sure to highlight this in our full Gettysburg guide.
Historians have since worked out that Lincoln was actually standing next door, in the Evergreen Cemetery…the private, civilian cemetery right beside the National one. There was a flagpole there at the time, and Lincoln was positioned near it, looking back toward the National Cemetery as he spoke. You can still see the mausoleum where they believe the podium actually stood, tucked back under the trees. It’s an easy thing to miss if you don’t know to look for it.
271 words. About two minutes. A crowd of 20,000 people. November 19th, 1863, four and a half months after the battle that made the ground underneath everyone’s feet worth dedicating in the first place. Lincoln arrived the day before and finished writing it in town that night.
What gets me about Evergreen cemetery, wrong monument aside, is who actually built it. The woman who served as caretaker did the mapping, the logistics, all of it, while her husband was off fighting in the war…seven months pregnant the whole time. That’s not a footnote. That’s someone doing genuinely hard, physical, unglamorous work so an entire cemetery could exist.
There’s another one in there worth knowing about, too…the Friend to Friend monument. It depicts Winfield Scott Hancock and Lewis Armistead, two men who’d been close friends before the war, who studied together, who ended up on opposite sides at Gettysburg. Armistead was mortally wounded leading Pickett’s Charge, and the story goes that the two men made peace with each other as he was dying. That’s the whole tragedy of a civil war in one monument. You’re not just fighting a stranger. You’re fighting someone you went to school with.
Only about eight Confederate soldiers ended up buried in the National Cemetery itself. Most of the Confederate dead were scattered across the battlefield and the town, plenty later moved back home to places like Richmond, and every so often construction crews in Gettysburg still turn up a body nobody accounted for.
I keep coming back to something as simple as this: an entire war turned on this ground, and even the most famous speech ever given about it, in the exact place people think they know so well, has been standing in the wrong spot in our collective memory. Next time you’re there, walk next door.
If you can visit in the fall, perhaps even on November 19th, you can be one of the lucky ones to stand in the place where President Lincoln gave arguably his most famous speech of all-time. And his shortest.
The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863