Where Did Lincoln Deliver the Gettysburg Address?
by Allen C. Guelzo
That sounds like one of those 4th-grade gags we used to pull on the backbench of the school bus, in the same league with “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” and “What was the color of Washington’s white horse?” In this case, the question has more point than we might think. Yes, Abraham Lincoln really did go to Gettysburg, the site of the greatest battle of the American Civil War, to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery there in November, 1863. But it is at least true, also, that he did not deliver these “remarks” (he never actually called them ‘The Gettysburg Address’) within the precincts of the town. The Soldiers National Cemetery had been laid out after the battle on Cemetery Hill, on the town’s south edge, where the town cemetery (known as the Evergreen Cemetery) had also been created in 1854. But Cemetery Hill had certainly been involved in the fighting there in July 1863. Union artillery had used Cemetery Hill as an ideal platform from which to dominate the rest of the battlefield. So, yes, with those slight footnotes added, Lincoln delivered the Address at Gettysburg.
What still makes the question worth asking, though, is the uncertainty about exactly where the platform from which he delivered the Address was located on the day of the dedication. The Soldiers’ National Cemetery was the inspiration of Gettysburg lawyer David Wills, who pulled numerous political strings to acquire seventeen acres of hilltop adjacent to the Evergreen Cemetery as a “final resting place” for 3500 Union soldiers who had died in the battle. Wills hired landscape architect William Saunders, and arranged for a star-studded dedication ceremony on November 19th which featured the nationally-renowned orator Edward Everett, members of the presidential cabinet, and of course President Lincoln himself. Everett spoke for two-and-a-half hours and said nothing that anyone remembered the next day; Lincoln spoke for two-and-a-half minutes, and we’ve been reciting his words to ourselves ever since.
Nobody, however, seems to have thought to record the exact location of the speakers’ platform that day. It’s not that there was any shortage of observers and note-takers. Fifteen thousand people had crowded into the small south-central town the day before, and there was a substantial flock of reporters, and even three photographers: Peter Weaver, Alexander Gardner and David Bachrach. But the platform, which accommodated more than thirty dignitaries, was a temporary affair, and no one afterwards expected that it deserved some honorable mention of its own. Then in 1869, a little less than six years after the dedication ceremonies, a 60-foot-high Soldiers’ National Monument, designed by J.B. Batterson of Hartford, Connecticut, was formally dedicated at the center-point of the semi-circular grave plat of the Cemetery. Gradually, in the years following, the site of the Monument was assumed to have been the location of the platform from which Everett and Lincoln spoke. Even the tourist guidebooks which were published through the end of the century agreed, a little hastily, that the Monument marked the spot where Lincoln delivered his Address.1
But was it? This presumption was challenged in 1960, when Louis A. Warren, the Director of the Lincoln National Life Foundation in Fort Wayne, Indiana, acquired a copy of the planning document for the cemetery – the Revised Report of the Select Committee of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery (1865) – which had once belonged to William Yates Selleck, one of the original commissioners for the creation of the Cemetery. On page 52 of his copy of the Report, Selleck pasted a handwritten notation which identified a site on the other side of the semi-circular grave plat (fully a hundred yards north of the Monument and further down the gentle westward slope of the Cemetery) as the true location of the speakers’ platform. On the facing page of the Report Selleck pencilled in a rectangle on a map of the Cemetery to specify the site (which would place the speakers’ platform at the outer end of the grass alley between the Michigan and New York sections of the Cemetery).2
Warren was persuaded by the Selleck notation, partially because of Selleck’s personal involvement with the Cemetery’s organization (he had even sat on the platform at the dedication) but even more by the common-sense consideration that a speakers’ platform erected on the site of the Soldiers’ National Monument would have required the crowd witnessing the ceremonies to stand directly upon the semi-circle of grave sites, many of which had already been filled in. The Selleck site would have moved the platform and the crowd down the slope and away from the graves.
However, the novelty of questioning the Monument site aroused Gettysburg National Military Park historian Frederick Tilberg, who argued in 1973 that the Selleck site would have made nonsense of many newspaper accounts of the 1863 dedication which contained references to landscape features which can be seen from the Monument site but which cannot be seen from the Selleck site on the cemetery’s westward-falling slope. Tilberg also cited the comments of Cincinnati reporter Whitelaw Reid, who covered the 1863 dedication ceremonies and who identified the speakers’ platform in his dispatch as the spot where the Monument was to be located.3
Curiously, neither Tilberg nor Warren made serious use of the photographs of the dedication ceremonies, which offered clear views of the platform area, the gatehouse of the neighboring Evergreen Cemetery, and a tall flagpole which had been erected for the dedication (all three were also visible in a lithograph illustration which appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 5, 1863). In 1978, Gettysburg National Military Park historian Kathleen G. Harrison conducted a careful study of the alignment and locations required to produce these views, and concluded that it was the flagpole, not the speakers’ platform, which had stood on the present site of the Monument, while the speakers’ platform must have been constructed at least 100 feet or more east of the Monument site, on the opposite side of the semi-circle of graves from the Selleck site and further up the slope from both the Selleck site and the Monument site.
The Harrison site satisfied the need for a location which would have kept distant landscape features fully in view, as well as allowing room for the spectators of the dedication ceremonies to gather near the platform without disturbing the graves. The Harrison site did, however, pose one important difficulty: according to Harrison’s survey, the speakers’ platform would have had to stand on the adjoining property of the Evergreen Cemetery rather than within the actual boundary of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. But since no physical divider separated the two properties in 1863, and no graves in that portion of the Evergreen Cemetery had then been filled, the Harrison site offered the best reconciliation with the photographic evidence of any of the three possible sites of the speakers’ platform.4
One further development in understanding the location of the platform came from Christopher Oakley in 2022. Oakley, a professor of new media at the University of North Carolina, used animation and digital modelling to determine that the platform was significantly larger than originally supposed, and shaped as a trapezoid, so that the sitters in the platform (including Lincoln) were arranged in a shallow semi-circle. The actual location of the platform remained approximately the same, only now straddling what would later emerge as the boundary between the Soldiers’ National Cemetery and the Evergreen Cemetery. Oakley’s modelling would also slightly shift the orientation of the platform, so that the face of the platform would angle to the northwest. So, when Lincoln rose to speak, Oakley’s model would have him standing within – although only just barely – the current boundaries of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery.5
Unless an archeological dig uncovers evidence of soil disturbance and moldered fragments of the posts which supported the platform, the Harrison and Oakley models will probably give us the likeliest sense of where the platform stood, which is a point along the line between the two cemeteries and 60 to 100 feet east of the Monument. But I use the word probably; the historian must always be prepared for surprises. And wherever the platform actually rested, and whatever its shape actually was, the one incontestable thing we can take away from that autumnal day in 1863 is Lincoln’s Address.
(Pause).
Oh, wait. There’s even some debate about that. But that will be for another Substack article.
The Soldiers’ National Cemetery dedication ceremonies, November 19, 1863, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (December 5, 1863). The view is looking south and westward; the roadway lined with carriages is the Baltimore Pike. The Evergreen Cemetery gateway is on the left, across the Pike. The speakers’ platform is in the center distance, appearing to the right of the enormous poplar tree (which stood across the Baltimore Pike from the gateway). The flagpole at the far right occupies the space where the Soldiers’ National Monument is now found.
F. Lauriston Bullard, “A Few Appropriate Remarks”: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (Harrowgate, TN, 1944),12-13.
Louis A. Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Declaration: “A New Birth of Freedom” (Fort Wayne, IN, 1964), 180-182; see also Frank L. Klement, The Gettysburg Soldiers’ Cemetery and Lincoln’s Address (Shippensburg, PA, 1993), 179-192.
“Have We Done Lincoln Justice at Gettysburg? No, Says Dr. Louis Warren, Yes, Says Dr. Frederick Tilburg,” Civil War Times Illustrated (July 1976), 10-17.
William A. Frassanito, Early Photography at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, PA, 1995), 163-166.
Christopher Oakley, “Placing the Platform: Using 3D Technology to Pinpoint Lincoln at Gettysburg,” Lincoln Lore (Summer 2023), 8-17.