GIVING MEANING TO THE SLAUGHTER

Survivors called it a perfect hell on earth, the devil’s slaughter pen. The ground that had grown swaying fields of corn and wheat was soaked with blood. Thousands of men’s bodies lay putrefying in puddles of blood and mud. Some of the dead men embedded in this hell clutched their bibles. The three-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the bloodiest battle ever in the Western Hemisphere, left nearly as many dead or debilitated as all the American soldiers felled in the decade-long Vietnam War. Although the Union forces had lost almost half of the casualties, “it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” a victorious Union soldier exulted.1 The battered Confederate remnants hobbled back home across the Potomac. From then on the rebels waged a defensive war whose days were numbered. But the stench and pollution from the crashingly quiet battlefield, overrun by buzzards and black flies, alarmed the traumatized farming town of Gettysburg in southeastern Pennsylvania. “In many instances arms and legs and sometimes heads protrude,” Gettysburg banker David Wills reported to the governor, “and my attention has been directed to several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them.”2 Wills cranked gears in motion to create a massive burial ground that became the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. Like all cemeteries of the time, it had to be formally dedicated. When poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier refused Wills’s invitation, he turned to the greatest orator of the age, Edward Everett, diplomat, ex-senator, and Harvard president. Belatedly Wills invited the president of the United States to make “a few appropriate remarks.” As in early July, thousands of Americans invaded the farm town just before Thanksgiving, but these people were older and well clothed, women and men, all on the same side. Everett spoke of the battle for two hours, enthralling the crowd. Abraham Lincoln followed him, for three minutes. He was disappointed by the tepid response. Yet his melodic 272-word speech transmuted the grisly deaths on the battlefield—burying of the decayed bodies still not complete, Cemetery Ridge still pockmarked with rusted rifles, strips of blue and gray, skeletons of horses—into the vital value of the war. Out of these parched fields of death Americans would create new life, Lincoln proclaimed, a “new birth of freedom,” national rebirth. His words rewrote the nation’s founding document of 1776 as a commitment to equality more than to life or even liberty, and set the stage for postwar reform of the Constitution to follow suit. He accomplished a feat in a few phrases that history had belied and that the war had so far cruelly mocked: conjuring the meaning of America as a single people dedicated to a single proposition, their union defined by equality. Lincoln’s incantation, which drew no distinction between North and South, forged the ideal of a new America that would complete the American Revolution, a second founding to fulfill what was promised in the first.3 But at what cost? Although the Union commander-in-chief may have confessed later that he became a Christian only after seeing the “graves of our dead heroes” at Gettysburg—“I then and there consecrated myself to Christ”—he was glorifying, even sacralizing, hideous, painful death, the mass destruction of the young men under his ultimate command who on this battlefield died senselessly.4 Neither side had a compelling reason to fight at Gettysburg, no strategic necessity. And the suicidal “Pickett’s charge” up Cemetery Hill was one of the craziest blunders in military history, for which Robert E. Lee asked his Confederate president to fire him. Transubstantiating the flesh and blood of fifty thousand young Americans killed or wounded into an abstract promise of equality and union, himself as high priest of this Eucharist, Lincoln justified the mad horror of the war, no matter what the outcome. In four years over six hundred thousand Americans would die over Lincoln’s lofty principles, seeding the national myth that it was a war of sacred justice. The war freed the slaves, and it launched a powerful industrial nation with railroads steaming from sea to shining sea. But equality of any sort would remain a mirage. Lincoln was speaking over the heads of his audience, beyond hearing of the buried heroes, to an America that did not exist. The heroes had died for Lincoln’s dream.