President Abraham Lincoln’s two-minute remarks during the dedication of the Soldiers’ Cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863 may be the most heralded words ever delivered in the English language. For nearly 160 years, the legacy and mythology surrounding that brief address consigned the orations of the two principal speakers of that day, Edward Everett and Charles Anderson, to historical obscurity. Everett’s two-hour address was so instrumental that he convinced organizers to postpone the entire ceremony for almost thirty days so that he could prepare properly. Anderson’s forty-minute effort, which concluded the day’s events, never appeared in print until it was rediscovered in a cardboard box in Wyoming in the twenty-first century.
David Wills invited Lincoln to speak just seventeen days before the dedication, realizing that the president’s enormous responsibilities in the midst of civil war might preclude his attendance. Lincoln finally committed just four days before the event. At this point, the president began composing what would become his most famous speech.
Many historians eschew “what if” questions; however, there was a distinct possibility that events might have caused Lincoln to cancel his Gettysburg trip at the last minute. If that had happened, the president’s most trusted advisor, Secretary of State William H. Seward, was prepared to step in and deliver what Wills requested as a “few appropriate remarks.” Although Seward was an unflinching supporter of Lincoln’s policies, had his remarks graced the platform that late November day, rather than Lincoln’s immortal words, historians would have remembered the dedication much differently.
Seward was born into a slaveholding family in rural New York, so it is ironic that he became known as one of the strongest advocates for racial justice among leading politicians of the nineteenth century. Most politicians like Seward were not free to express their anti-slavery positions fully and openly, as extreme positions on such sensitive issues often meant career suicide; yet Seward’s actions and some of his statements belied strong sympathy with abolitionists. He and his wife sheltered escaped slaves in their home in Auburn, New York. When defending a black man an 1846 trial, Seward made a remarkable assertion of racial equality: “In spite of human pride, he is still your brother, and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father, and yours, and mine, and bears equality with us the proudest inheritance of our race—the image of our maker.”
