Free Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman Page A

cabled. But Meade hesitated, allowing Lee to move his retreating troops safely across the Potomac. "We had them within our grasp," the president wailed. "We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours."
    Lincoln had not yet found the commander he needed. He feared now that the war would go on indefinitely. "What can I do with such generals as we have?" he asked. "Who among them is any better than Meade?"

    Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle in American history.

    Union and Confederate dead on the battlefield at Gettysburg.
    Four months later, a ceremony was held at Gettysburg to dedicate a national cemetery for the soldiers who had died there. The main speaker was to be Edward Everett of Massachusetts, the most celebrated orator of the day. The president was asked to deliver "
a
few appropriate remarks" after Everett had finished.
    Lincoln wanted to make a brief statement about the larger meaning of the war, which was now well into its third year. He started work on his speech in Washington, but it was not yet finished when he rode a special train to Gettysburg the day before the ceremony. After dinner that evening, he retired to his room to work on the speech again. He added the final touches after breakfast the next morning. He had written it out on two pieces of lined paper. There were about 270 words. "It is what I would call a short, short speech," he said.
    That morning, wearing his familiar black suit and silk stovepipe hat, Lincoln rode on horseback to the cemetery on the outskirts of Gettysburg, accompanied by politicians and other dignitaries, by brass bands and marching soldiers. The official party paraded across the battlefield, where dead horses still lay stiffly on their sides among scattered autumn leaves. A crowd of fifteen thousand had assembled in front of the speaker's platform, which faced the unfinished cemetery's temporary graves and the famous battlefield beyond.
    Edward Everett spoke for two hours as many in the crowd grew restless and wandered off to explore the battleground. Finally it was Lincoln's turn. He rose from his seat, took two bits of paper from his pocket, put on his spectacles, and in his reedy voice said: "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."
    A photographer in the crowd fiddled with his camera, preparing to take a picture of the president as he spoke. But before he could get the camera ready, the speech was finished.
    Lincoln spoke for two minutes. Some of his listeners were disappointed. Opposition newspapers criticized the address as unworthy of the occasion, and some papers didn't mention it at all. Lincoln himself felt that the speech was a failure. He certainly didn't realize that the words he spoke at Gettysburg on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, would be remembered all over the world as an American classic more than a hundred years later.
    The war was being fought, Lincoln had said, to preserve America's bold experiment in democracy. A new kind of government had been created by the Founding Fathers in 1776. It was based on the idea that all men have an equal right to liberty that they can govern themselves by free elections. The war was a test to determine if such a government could endure. Thousands of men had fought and died at Gettysburg so that the nation and its idea of democracy might survive. Now it was up to the living to complete their unfinished work, to make sure that "those dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom—and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
     
    Worry and fatigue had become etched into the president's features. As the war dragged on, Lincoln could not forget that the conflict involved human lives. The entrance hall to the White House was always jammed with people