Gettysburg's Good News
Schoolkids learn Lincoln's words at the scene of the epic battle by heart. But what did they really mean?
"God pity us!" When people approach the town, "the odors of the battle-field" attack them long before they get there. But the visitors come, many to help, some to gawk, some to plunder, most looking for their lost loved ones. Visitors are "compelled to roost in the barns, or upon the steps of dwellings." A man feels lucky when he gets a chair to sit through the night in front of a hotel; better than wandering till daybreak. On July 13, the small Broadhead house, in addition to a family of three, has three wounded soldiers, and 20 visitors. The strangers "are filling every bed and covering the floors." But these problems shrink in the face of the suffering of the wounded and the dying.
Pvt. George Frysinger arrives with an emergency militia unit sent to help maintain order. "We had a severe trial for young soldiers," he writes home to his father. His unit had limped into town on "blistered feet" and got placed in a church. The sacred structure reminded him of his home, which now felt "like a distant Jerusalem to the ancient Jews.... Perhaps we will not deface it much," this church, Frysinger writes to his father, adding: "Gettysburg can not be called a town, but a large collection of hospitals."
Eliza Farnham, a volunteer nurse from Philadelphia, writes the same. "The whole town ... is one vast hospital ... avenues of white tents ... But, good God! What those quiet-looking tents contained!... Dead and dying, and wounded ... torn to pieces in every way." Moans, shrieks, weeping, and prayer fill the houses, the barns, the tents, the fields and woods, the whole area. The land itself seems to wail. Hell on Earth.
Red and some green flags sprout everywhere, identifying places housing the wounded. Nothing like this has ever happened in the United States. Looking back in September, a private commission will report "a scene of horror and desolation which humanity, in all the centuries of its history has seldom witnessed." The more measured tones of an Army medical officer's report are blunt: "The period of ten days following the battle of Gettysburg was the occasion of the greatest amount of human suffering known in this nation since its birth...."
So it remains to this day: the country's greatest man-made emergency ever. The two armies, expecting another battle, took most of their medical personnel away. The doctor in charge likens this to engaging in battle "without ammunition." "What! Take away surgeons here where a hundred are wanted?" a civilian exclaims. "But so it is." Of 106 medical officers the Union Army left behind, perhaps 35 could actually operate.
Six days after the Battle of Gettysburg, nurse Ellen Orbison Harris writes home about wounded men drowning in flash floods and thousands who are "still naked and starving. God pity us! God pity us!" This is the place where Abraham Lincoln will have to come and explain why the bloodletting must go on.
"A vision." The president speaks in a firm voice. This is the first speech that he wrote out ahead of delivery in 2 ½ years, the first since his inaugural address. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Looking back to the Revolutionary War reminds people that the birth of the nation had cost great sacrifices. July 4, 1776, has been much on the minds of Americans for decades, and for most, "created equal" now meant the right to rise in life. But quoting the Declaration of Independence in 1863 also defended the Emancipation Proclamation that had drastically changed the character of the Civil War. It presented a strong message about liberty without speaking of slavery outright and so alienating those who only wished to fight for the Union and not the ending of bondage.
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