OCR Text |
Show en Li ncoln Spoke GUg L eScore ancJ 15 Years Ago" llv l,'r . " . vu'Hiast to the rich fnii ' minutes in SoC I P0Ple bn to weary it was something of a re : ' cn he finished and 1 ere was a 00rtain of interest when the nex el? "I3'00 3nd drew himself him-self to his full height. 1'our score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Lib- f -f vo. L i ', (cr J AeUXZc -&J ijU fcA -Xj .yJ -C&o vVTM (UUI tZ&Jlm, EDWARD EVERETT If the Gettysburg Address helped maks Lincoln immortal, it is one of the ironies of fate that it also helped thrust into obscurity obscu-rity Edward Everett, the man who had been cast in the role of "chief orator" at the dedication of the battlefield, so that he is now something of a "forgotten man" and he lives in memory mainly as "the other man who spoke at Gettysburg." Everett was born In Dorchester, Mass., April 11, 1794, a membor of one of the leading families of New England. After several years of travel in Germany and England Eng-land he returned to this country to occupy the chair of Greek literature lit-erature at Harvard and to become be-come editor of the North American Ameri-can Review. One of the earliest examples of the "scholar in politics," poli-tics," Everett became successively successive-ly congressman, governor of Massachusetts, Mas-sachusetts, minister plenipotentiary plenipoten-tiary to England and, after a brief interim as president of Harvard, Har-vard, secretary of state in President Presi-dent Fillmore's cabinet. But his chief claim to fame lies in his being a vigorous champion of American institutions when it was the fashion in Europe to sneer at our democracy, and an equally vigorous champion of honesty in public affairs and of social justice. He was a resolute opponent of white occupation of Indian lands without the consent of the red man. To him also was due the preservation of a sound currency in the panic of 1837 and the establishment of the first board of education in the United States. No mean record of accomplishment, ac-complishment, this, and to it should be added the fact that he was considered, the greatest orator ora-tor in the country at that time. He had staked out his claim to that distinction early in life. In 1824, while he was teaching at Harvard, he was chosen to address ad-dress the Phi Beta Kappa society at Cambridge on the progress of literature in the United States. Tribute to Lafayette. Everyone expected him to deliver de-liver the usual scholarly address for scholarly men. But one circumstance cir-cumstance helped change that, i ; ., . wwctiwt v I r yrr jr, nu ; v ? ' "4 , ''h-x-. . if n I ' LINCOLN SPEAKING AT GETTYSBURG (From a contemporary drawing). , i In the audience was Marquis de Lafayette, now an old man, who had come back to America to receive the tribute of the people for whose liberties he had fought nearly a half century earlier. Near the end of Everett's speech, he turned to the old soldier sol-dier and launched into a tribute to him with such fervor and eloquence elo-quence that his audience was held spellbound, silent, for several minutes. Then it burst into a roar of handclapping and cheering. cheer-ing. Everett had said what every American felt in his heart about Lafayette and he had done it so graciously and expressively that his speech became the sensation of the hour, not only in this country coun-try but in France as welL Helped Save Mt. Vernon. erty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," the shrill voice proclaimed. People leaned forward to listen, lis-ten, for it was difficult for some of them to hear. A minute passed . . . two minutes . . . then: " . . That this nation, under God, 'shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth." With those words the speaker sat down. His audience looked at each other in amazement. Why, he had stopped just when they thought he was beginning! Who ever heard of a man making such a short speech! They were right. For there were exactly 272 words in that speech. As he sat down there was but veVy little applause and that was onnarently for the speaker, be-apparenuy be-apparenuy io President of cause he was me the United States, and not tor we words he had uttered. But in that thev were wrong. For the speech wWch they had just listened rgAdres,Lrt3asGs- bUnSH "a classic -which will en- Ture'so lonfas the English lan- guage is spoken. A Disappointed Audience. t tha lieht of that statement In the light oi d.s -tWhse1ms strang'e indeed sent it seems thaV75 S aS were so little tered 75 years ag was impressed by E Barton the case. ur; vv. m at Gettys- ident's speech seem speech at ail- t and of t0ld f the President. Inciden-seeing Inciden-seeing 0,6 mentioned the tally some of tnem president had uttere mark: f But while they were 5raTtot'veheardhim.notmany of them at the time said very much about the President's speech. A "few remarks" indeed! Yet, the people who heard him were not the only ones who felt that way about it. Another of Lincoln's Lin-coln's biographers, Ward H. La-mon, La-mon, has recorded Lincoln's own dissatisfaction with his speech . . . how he himself called it "a flat failure" and added, after he returned re-turned to Washington, "I tell you, that speech fell on the audience like a wet blanket. I am distressed dis-tressed about it. I ought to have prepared it with more care." But he was wrong about that, just as he was wrong when, in the speech itself, he said "the world will little note nor long remember re-member what we say here." Perhaps Per-haps the world "little noted" at the time what he said there. But certainly it seems destined to "long remember." However, Lincoln wasn't the "world's worst prophet" in this respect. That title must go to the editor of the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot and Union who wrote an editorial in which he said: "The President succeeded on this occasion occa-sion because he acted without sense and without constraint in a panorama that was gotten up more for the benefit of his party than for the glory of the nation and the honor of the dead ... We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of." Of course, that was the fulmi-nation fulmi-nation of a bitterly partisan newspaper news-paper But the Harrisburg editor wasn't alone in his attitude. For, as Barton records, "The Chicago Times and the Register in Lincoln's Lin-coln's own home town of Springfield Spring-field and other partisan newspapers newspa-pers were equally caustic and equally unjust." Lincoln Overlooked. One of the most interesting examples ex-amples of failure of the editors to appreciate the speech was that of the New York Times. The following day it carried an editorial edi-torial under the head "Two Great Orations" which said: "We devote de-vote a broadside of this morning's morn-ing's Times to the publication of two orations which we are sure will command the attention of the day." It then went on to discuss dis-cuss the beauty of language and the eloquent voices of "two masters mas-ters of oratory." One of these was Edward Everett, who had spoken at the dedication of the National cemetery at Gettysburg. The other was NOT Abraham Lincoln at the same ceremony. It was Rev. Henry Ward Beech-er, Beech-er, who had just returned from England and on the evening of the day before had addressed a great crowd at the Academy of Music in his home city of Brooklyn. Brook-lyn. To the credit of Edward Everett, Ever-ett, however, let it be said that he was one of the few possibly the only one who recognized the greatness of Lincoln's speech at the time. He wrote to Lincoln the next day: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Tributes From England. But if the greatness of the Gettysburg Get-tysburg speech was not appreciated appreci-ated at the time it was uttered, recognition was not long in coming. com-ing. Nor has that recognition been confined to his fellow-countrymen. It was Lord Charmwood of England who characterized the speech as "a classic which will endure as long as the English language is spoken." And another an-other Englishman, Lord Curzon, in a lecture at the University of Cambridge paid it this tribute: "I escape the task of deciding which is the masterpiece of modern mod-ern English eloquence by awarding award-ing the prize to an American. The Gettysburg Address is far more than a pleasing piece of occasional occa-sional oratory. It is a marvelous marvel-ous piece of English composition. It is a pure well of English undefined. un-defined. Lincoln's words are among the glories and treasures of mankind." In 1853 he used his eloquence in a cause which helped spread his fame. He became interested in the effort to raise $200,000 to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve pre-serve it as a national shrine. He prepared an address on the character char-acter of Washington and delivered deliv-ered this address more than 120 times in various cities all over the country. People came from afar to hear him not because there was anything new in what he had to tell them about the Father Fa-ther of His Country but because of the grace and style of the orator's ora-tor's presentation of his subject. As a result Everett turned over to the women who were trying to save Mount Vernon nearly $70,000 and did more, perhaps, than any other individual in accomplishing accomplish-ing their purpose. Early in the Civil war he began delivering speeches to arouse enthusiasm en-thusiasm for the Northern cause. They were not finished orations they were stirring calls to action. He became the most powerful platform orator of his day. So it was only natural that those in charge of the dedication of the National cemetery at Gettysburg should have thought of him first when selecting an orator for the occasion. His long and distinguished career ca-reer came to an end January 15 13G3 three months too early to see the triumph of the cause which he had so ably championed. |