Michael Jesberger greeted attendees to his lecture, Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, wearing the woolen blue uniform of a Civil War “Billy Yank.”
The lecture was in Hamburg’s Borough Hall on Nov. 17, just two days before the 152nd anniversary of the historic address on Nov. 19, 1863, and was sponsored by the Hamburg Public Library.
Jesberger hoped listeners would identify with Civil War era soldiers and families. He also discussed the personal toll years of war had on Lincoln, holding up images of the healthy-looking president at the time he took office, and a sharply-contrasting haggard Lincoln just four years later.
“When you talk about the Gettysburg Address,” Jesberger explained, “you have to realize that this is what happened on his watch. It’s his explanation to the nation of what happened.
“By 1863, the civil war had been in swing for two years. People were tired of this war,” he added, and many in the North and South held Lincoln responsible for the rising death toll. “In the North, the mood is not good. They are in a roller coaster ride of defeat.”
The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863) is considered a turning point in the war, and the dedication of the cemetery later that year actually featured professional speaker Edward Everett, who took weeks to prepare his two-hour speech.
By contrast, Lincoln was invited as an afterthought and spoke for just two minutes. Jesberger considers the speech a masterpiece, with its hourglass structure (bringing listeners from a continent to a battlefield to a specific field) and use of repetition to bring home key thoughts. The word nation is used five times, for example, reinforcing Lincoln’s belief that the North and South still comprised one country.
Lincoln had been a long time religious scoffer, but the Gettysburg Address marked a turning point.
“He is moved to the point of making profound reflection,” Jesberger said, for the first time using the phrase “under God” in a speech.
From this point forward, Lincoln’s speeches and writing would include Biblical references and religious tones.
Not all people realize, Jesberger said, the personal difficulties Lincoln was also facing. His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had been seriously injured in a carriage accident in July of 1863 and he was unable to be at her side and lead the country. He was still mourning the death of one son, Willy, when he arrived in Gettysburg; a second son, Tad, was now showing signs of the same illness. And Lincoln himself was suffering from small pox when he gave the now-famous address.
When he arrived in Gettysburg in November, Lincoln found a small community devastated by the effects of the massive, three-day battle four months earlier which left 150 thousand men dead or wounded.
“For the first time, he sees what he’s created on his watch,” Jesberger surmised. “There are the graves. What do you say? How can you sum that up?”
Lincoln chose to focus on the sacrifice of the men on that battlefield before him. He spoke of freedom and, Jesberger noted, focused on the idea that the nation remained just that, a united nation.
“Lincoln’s speech has not always had the status it has today,” Jesberger said. “It took another hundred years, to the 1960s, for the true meaning of his speech to sink in.”
Jesberger has spoken at two previous Hamburg Library events and plans are in place for another lecture, this one on the role of Irish soldiers in the American Civil War.
The public is invited to another free program on Dec. 10, The White Caps of Pearl Harbor: the Army and Navy Nurses of World War II. This lecture will be presented by Winifred Woll beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the Municipal Center, 61 North 3rd Street, Hamburg. For details on this and other Hamburg Public Library programs, call the library at 610-562-2843.
