Federal dead on the field of battle, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Over the years, we have built up an array of special online resources designed to assist with teaching the story of Gettysburg, but this summer, we’ve done some of our best work yet on this front.  Our 2018 interns –Frank Kline, Becca Stout, and Cooper Wingert– have organized a series of fascinating posts that tackle less-familiar topics related to the 1863 battle, and the famous cemetery dedication which followed.  

Teachers and students can now learn first-hand many of the tragic details about the so-called “slave hunt” that occurred during the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania in June 1863.  Wingert provides links to diaries and other records that detail how the Army of Northern Virginia captured black residents in south-central Pennsylvania, treating them like fugitive slaves.  One of the cases involved a free black man named Amos Barnes, who was actually later released from a Confederate prison in Richmond because of the intervention of two Dickinsonians.  This summer, Wingert also wrote about the Confederate occupation and shelling of Carlisle in late June and early July, which was part of the famous 1863 campaign, but has mostly been forgotten because of the immense scale of the battle which followed at Gettysburg.  Wingert actually wrote a book about the Confederate approach to Harrisburg a few years ago, but now he has curated several primary sources related to the campaign, included several that have never before been available online.  

Our other interns focused on the story of the cemetery dedication in November 1863 and Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address.  Kline organized an incredibly useful post detailing contemporary newspaper reaction to Lincoln’s remarks and subsequent recollected accounts about how the short speech was written and received.  Kline’s work was inspired by Gabor Boritt’s thought-provoking study, The Gettysburg Gospel (2005).  Many teachers too easily embrace myths about the Gettysburg Address –that it was written on the back of envelope, for example, or that it was poorly received at first– and this post offers a helpful corrective.  Stout’s post also provides an important supplement, especially for classes or families that might be visiting the Soldiers’ National Cemetery themselves.  Stout describes how a half a dozen black army veterans came to be buried in the Civil War section of the national cemetery at Gettysburg.  The story is far more complicated than you might imagine, beginning with the sad revelation that even though the Battle of Gettysburg occurred seven months after the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s endorsement of black soldiers, Union commanders still excluded black men from combat roles in the 1863 fighting in Pennsylvania.  That meant, at first, that the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg was segregated, despite all of the hope of “a new birth of freedom.”

Other House Divided Project resources on Gettysburg

• Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addresses (2013) exhibit for Google Arts & Culture which tells the story of the five known copies of the speech in Lincoln’s own handwriting
• Gettysburg Virtual Tour (2013) video tour of the battlefield co-produced by the Gilder Lehrman Institute that includes 13 stops and one-hour total of material hosted by Mathew Pinsker
• Blog Divided posts (2007-2018) make sure to check out over two dozen posts on the battle, campaign and its aftermath at our main project blog site
• Research engine records (2007-2018), our main research engine database contains over a thousand records related to Gettysburg, including some amazing zoomable maps
• Lincoln’s Writings (2015), our multi-media edition of Lincoln’s writings ranks the Gettysburg Address as the #1 most teachable Lincoln document –check out the array of resources on this page
• Confederate monument (2015) –Did you know there is a Confederate monument in Mechanicsburg, PA marking an element of the 1863 Confederate invasion?  Check out this classroom-friendly discussion post to find out more.

Noted filmmaker Jake Boritt is coming to Carlisle on Wednesday, May 7, 2014 for a special free public showing and discussion of his latest film, “The Gettysburg Story,” a state-of-the-art documentary about the pivotal Civil War battle narrated by actor Stephen Lang.  What makes this film especially unique and cutting-edge is Boritt’s use of high-definition camera-enabled drone aircraft.  His innovative project quite literally depicts the 1863 battlefield from a perspective that you have never seen before. You will be amazed at the visual spectacle and fascinated by Boritt’s discussion of how 21st-century technology helped bring to life this classic 19th-century American story.

The Gettysburg Story Preview from Jake Boritt on Vimeo.

Click here to find out more or to register today for “Understanding Lincoln”

Last year, nearly 750 participants signed up for a unique online learning experience.  “Understanding Lincoln” was the first open, online graduate course offered in partnership between the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.  Taught by historian Matthew Pinsker, the course focused on classic Lincoln texts –not just his great speeches, but also his most important personal and political letters.  The participants studied and debated these documents through a series of live, interactive online sessions and helped create a brand-new website:  Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition.  Now, as we are getting ready to launch the 2.0 version of this exciting course (REGISTRATION CLOSES ON MAY 27, 2014), we think it’s worth sharing some of the comments from those who joined us during Fall Semester 2013.

From our auditors:

“I have seen the future, and it is “Understanding Lincoln.” Thanks again, and keep going with this approach as far as it will go!”

“I originally was just going to give the general kudos already stated above on a highly educational, interesting, and enjoyable course.  But having started to take [another] MOCC more recently in which I was very disappointed, I’ve decided it is important to re-enforce some of the particular techniques you used that were noticeable by their absence in the other course.  [Most important], the use of live interaction in video classroom sessions including on-line participation….The [other] course restricted live videos to semi-scripted sessions with teaching assistants, while “discussion” sessions were simply non-video chatrooms, sometimes with a 2nd level teaching assistant throwing in an occasional question, sometimes totally unstaffed.  In the video classrooms, Matt’s active role as discussion leader was very effective, particularly given your ability to actively monitor the chatline.”

“My goal in doing this was to add to my own knowledge, of course, and to provide some material to the greater community in the class.  This whole experience has been a very positive one for me and I thank you for all  of your hard and good work in putting it together.”

From our graduate participants:

“I just wanted to thank you again for the great academic experience provided through “Understanding Lincoln.”  I really learned a lot from the class and enjoyed every minute of it… I only wished I’d had more time to devote to my research!  I loved the amount of freedom we were given to create our own projects and having never designed a Web site before, I learned a great deal not only about historic content but also about 21st Century presentation!  There’s a lot more I still have to learn, but this was a good start!  In a strange way, I found all of our writing assignments to be a great release from my day-to-day school and family demands, so I really am sorry to see the class come to an end!”

“I’m so glad I took this class — living with Honest Abe these last four months has been a really moving experience in more ways than I can count and frankly, has made me realize that I need to keep pursuing history research and exploration as much as I can.”

“I just want to express my thanks in offering a challenging and yet rewarding course. My multi-media project has been shared with 100 other history teachers in my district and I have utilized it many times in my own classroom. The students are tickled at seeing their “teacher’s work” for a class on display in addition to its usefulness so I appreciate your multimedia project assignment.  I look forward to learning more…isn’t that the key to a successful class?”

“I’ve taught professional development courses and taken a lot of them myself, but I honestly found this to be one of the best classes I’ve taken since I was an undergrad 11 years ago.  I appreciated the expertise, depth of content and the flexibility you gave us to find our own areas of interest.  I also thought the online format was just a really interesting way to take a class.  Most helpful to my teaching, though, the website is already proving to be an amazing resource.  It’s a great project that is really going to help a lot of teachers across the country.”

“I am really proud of what I have learned through the course of this project and I thank you for the opportunity to do this for my students. I have very much enjoyed the course!”

“I really enjoyed the format of the class and the material presented within it. It was a logical arrangement of topics and primary sources, and I hope that our work helped you get closer to reaching your goal of creating an in-depth website that looks closely at Abraham Lincoln as both a person and president.”

“I want to also thank you for the experience provided by this course.  I feel like it has enhanced my  confidence teaching Lincoln and made me step out of my comfort zone and embrace the technology.  I learned a great deal, love the Lincoln writings site and will use your close readings in my classroom.”

“Thank you for an exciting past few months. Not only did I learn quite a bit about Lincoln, but I also learned some great technology programs to use with my students.”

“I know that I am a better teacher from the time I spent working on this course.”

Registration for the 2014 edition of the “Understanding Lincoln” course will remain open until May 27, 2014.  Full graduate student tuition costs $600.  Auditors pay a small fee of $25.  To sign up or to find out more details, go to the course registration page (http://gilderlehrman.org/programs-exhibitions/understanding-lincoln-graduate-course) and see for yourself.

This photo of a newly discovered Lincoln letter (provided by the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project) provoked scholars to wonder why there is a section mysteriously clipped out

Last Friday, the Associated Press reported on the discovery of a previously unknown Abraham Lincoln document, and with it, a puzzling mystery.  Addressed only to “My dear Sir,” a portion of the letter had been carefully removed, eliminating the key to understanding its meaning.  Lincoln appears to have been writing “in haste” to someone asking if he or she could “keep up a correspondence” with an unknown person.  “I like to know his views occasionally,” Lincoln wrote.  Researchers at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project focused on the peculiar phrase, “keep up a correspondence,” and ran it through their database, matching it to a letter written to Lincoln by fellow Republican Leonard Swett in June 1860.  In his note, Swett mentioned that he would “try to keep up a correspondence during the Campaign” with “our friend T W of Albany.”  Researchers believe these initials refers to Thurlow Weed, the powerful editor of the Albany Evening Journal, a leading Republican newspaper from New York.  During that period, Weed was essentially serving as a campaign manager for New York senator William Henry Seward, whom Lincoln had just defeated for the Republican presidential nomination in May 1860.  Candidate Lincoln needed full backing from Seward, Weed and their various supporters in the upcoming election but worried that he might not receive it because they were so disappointed over Seward’s unexpected defeat.  This would explain why Lincoln and Swett wanted to keep close tabs on Weed and his views and why Lincoln may have sent the mysterious letter featured above.

New letters and documents relating to Abraham Lincoln turn up more frequently than you might realize.  Just a few weeks ago for Time magazine, House Divided Project director Matthew Pinsker highlighted some recent discoveries that give us powerful new insights into Lincoln.  In 2008, scholars revealed that Lincoln had once fired off an angry letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune which belittled another Republican politician as “Sister Burlingame” and which Pinsker calls “the angriest, nastiest written statement Lincoln ever produced.”   Another newly discovered letter from 1859 reveals that Lincoln privately called slavery  the only “living issue of the day” and wrote that it would be “idiotic” to think otherwise.  Pinsker also points out that even something as monumental as the transcript for Lincoln’s very first national speech (1847) has only just recently been made available to scholars.

For teachers and students using our Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition site, we’ve added a new tool to help you examine some of the best of these recent documents for yourself.  Under the “Special Topics” heading, which can be found in the right-hand sidebar of every page, there is a link to  “recently discovered documents.” As you browse each of these documents, you can also use the tags at the bottom of each page to find other related materials.

In your quest for new Lincoln materials, however, always keep in mind that there are sometimes Lincoln forgeries in circulation, especially over the Internet.  This problem has even fooled us before.  Just remember that the most reputable sources for Lincoln documents remain the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln  and the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.  And, of course, we’ll do our best to help navigate the truth as well.

To honor Lincoln’s 205th birthday, we are tweeting out the top ten Lincoln resources from House Divided.  But here is the full list:

#1    Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition

Created by participants in the “Understanding Lincoln” open online graduate course (offered in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History), this site (still in development) features 150 of Lincoln’s “most teachable” documents and offers a full array of multi-media resources designed to help teach them in the K-12 and undergraduate classroom.  This site is especially useful for Common Core alignments.

#2   Building the Digital Lincoln (Journal of American History)

Created as part of the Lincoln Bicentennial anniversary, this site offers a snapshot of where the “Digital Lincoln” stood as of 2009, and includes a host of examples of research and presentation tools, especially designed for serious student and academic scholars.

#3   Emancipation Digital Classroom

Created in part to help transform insights from James Oakes’s prize-winning study, Freedom National (2013) into use for the modern-day classroom, this site presents an array of primary and secondary source tools for studying the complicated but fascinating subject of emancipation and abolition.

#4  Unofficial Teacher’s Guide to Spielberg’s Lincoln

This “unofficial” guide includes access to Tony Kushner’s script, a full cast of characters (with photo comparisons to actual historical figures), and extensive analysis of the artistic license in the film and the historical reaction to Steven Spielberg’s important movie project.

#5  Lincoln-Douglas Debates Digital Classroom

This site offers a clickable word cloud of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and host of other rare primary sources for use in studying these critical texts.

#6  Abraham Lincoln in the House Divided Research Engine

The House Divided Research Engine is a Drupal-based content management system that contains over 12,000 public domain images and tens of thousands of documents and other historical records.  The link above takes users directly to Abraham Lincoln’s main record page and offers a well-curated gateway for Lincoln research.

#7  Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addresses (Google Cultural Institute)

This short but compelling exhibit came together as part of the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address and helps visitors understand the evolution of the document, including a sharp analysis of all five manuscript versions of the address in Lincoln’s handwriting.

#8  Lincoln’s Autobiographical Sketch (YouTube & RapGenius)

Dickinson College students Leah Miller and Will Nelligan helped create short but engaging tools for studying Lincoln’s most important autobiographical writing –a sketch he produced in late 1859 to help launch his presidential bid.  There is a six minute YouTube video of the sketch and an annotated edition of it through the new platform at RapGenius.

#9  Burlingame’s Lincoln Biography (Teaching Edition)

Michael Burlingame’s prize-winning Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008) is the most important new multi-volume study of Lincoln, but it is difficult to teach because it is so lengthy.  With permission, however, from both the author and the publisher (Johns Hopkins University Press), we have created short visually enhanced excerpts from the work that focus on the election of 1860 and include clickable footnotes, allowing teachers and students to “see” Burlingame’s sources directly.

#10  Mash Up of Collected Works, Lincoln Day-By-Day, and Lincoln Papers

Created by technologist Rafael Alvarado, this mash up includes an integrated interface allowing users to see the online edition of Lincoln’s Collected Works (his known writings), Lincoln Day-By-Day (his daily schedule), and The Abraham Lincoln Papers At the Library of Congress (the bulk of his extant correspondence) for the essential “one-stop” shopping experience.  There is nothing else quite like this “timemap” available on the Internet –a must-see for serious and aspiring scholars.

In the days leading up to our expert panel at Ford’s Theatre, we thought it might be useful to scan the headlines for the latest in Lincoln invocations, political or otherwise. In other words, who’s actually asking, “what would Lincoln do (WWLD)?” Just this week, Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University who has written about everything from 19th century religious cults to the music of Bob Dylan, published an op-ed in The New York Times detailing the issues that led to the inclusion of a clause about “the public debt” in the Fourteenth Amendment. The piece is a challenge to the arguments Professor Lawrence Tribe has made for years against the Fourteenth Amendment’s purported application to the debt ceiling. Responding directly to Tribe, Wilentz writes, “these assertions…have no basis in the history of the 14th Amendment…in fact, that record clearly shows that Congress intended the amendment to prevent precisely the abuses that the current House Republicans blithely condone.”

The President has already ruled out the use of the 14th Amendment, saying “there are no magic bullets here.”

You can read Wilentz’s articulations of that history yourself. What’s important for our purposes is what he says later about Abraham Lincoln. “As Lincoln well knew,” Wilentz writes in response to Tribe’s contention that presidents lack clear authority over the debt ceiling, “the executive, in times of national crisis, can invoke emergency powers to protect the Constitution.” There is certainly plenty of material in the annals of Lincolniana ( I just discovered the term) that supports this point, not least of which is Lincoln’s decision to suspend habeas corpus. The problem with the analogy (and, to some extent, the inherent problem with analogies) is that it misses out on important contextual questions. Perhaps we can all accept that Lincoln believed in “emergency powers,” but would he have termed this moment as such? Would a national default represent the same kind of political and constitutional conflagration that the Civil War did? I find it hard to label Wilentz’s piece an ‘abuse’ of the Lincoln moniker, but his comparative lack of attention to the substance of the Lincoln/Obama, Lincoln/debt ceiling analogy does suggest that he might have been searching for one more point to bolster the broader credibility of his argument.

“What Would Lincoln Do? Understanding How Lincoln Gets Used (And Abused) in Today’s Washington” is a free public panel that will take place at Ford’s Theatre on Tuesday, October 15, 2013, from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.  Tickets may be reserved at http://www.fords.org/event/what-would-lincoln-do.  Those who cannot attend the panel, may view it online starting on the evening of October 16.  Information about where to obtain access to the video will be available through http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln.

I am moderating a special panel at Ford’s Theatre on Tuesday, October 15, 2013 from 12:30pm to 1:30pm on the always relevant topic of “What Would Lincoln Do?  Understanding How Lincoln Gets Used (And Abused) in Today’s Washington.”  This is part of the closing phase of the “Understanding Lincoln” online course (which the House Divided Project produces with the Gilder Lehrman Institute) but it is open to anybody who wants to attend in person or watch later on Vimeo or C-SPAN.  You can find out all of the details –and reserve seats- here, but this post (the first in a series about the event) is designed to more fully introduce our notable panel of experts and provide some easy access to their published opinions on these matters.

First, however, we should dispense with this shutdown business.  Ford’s Theatre is closed as long as the shutdown lasts, but our panel will continue regardless.  Ford’s Theatre has a new Center for Education & Leadership which is just across the street and which remains open to visitors.  We can always relocate there on October 15 if the crisis does not get resolved.

Our panel is a truly remarkable collection of figures who combine both expert knowledge of Abraham Lincoln with shrewd understanding of modern-day Washington and policy-making.  They include:

* Michael Lind, Policy Director, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation and author What Lincoln Believed (2006)
* Richard Norton Smith, noted presidential historian, George Mason University and former founding director, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
* Craig Symonds, Emeritus Professor of History, U.S. Naval Academy and Lincoln Prize-winning author, Lincoln and His Admirals (2008)
* James L. Swanson, Senior Scholar, Heritage Foundation and best-selling author, Manhunt (2006)

Michael Lind was one of the co-founders of the New America Foundation, a leading Washington DC think tank, which is co-sponsoring this event.  His current policy focus is on economic growth, but he has authored several thought-provoking books on American political history, including an engaging study of Abraham Lincoln entitled, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President (Doubleday, 2005).   In this work, which the New York Times called “intellectually bold” and one that “will almost certainly change the way you think about America and one of its greatest presidents,” Lind argues that Lincoln’s core conviction was democratic self-government and that he should be known first and foremost as, “the Great Democrat.”  Over the years, Lind has produced numerous books that invoke Lincoln’s legacy, but for the purposes of this panel, one of the most relevant was a short piece he authored for Salon in 2009, under the headline, “How would Lincoln vote today?”, which promised to reveal “where Lincoln really stood on the issues.”  The bottom line of this eminently readable (and thoroughly debatable) piece is Lind’s assertion that Lincoln “might find himself more at home among Democrats focused on technology and economic growth” (um, like folks at the New America Foundation, perhaps?) and that most emphatically, “Nobody with Lincoln’s religious and political beliefs could be a conservative Republican” today.

Richard Norton Smith might beg to disagree.  Smith is one of the nation’s most prominent presidential historians. Currently a history faculty member at George Mason University and completing a biography of Nelson Rockefeller, he has been a fixture over the years on C-SPAN and PBS “Newshour,” and a widely read political biographer of diverse figures such as Thomas Dewey, Herbert Hoover, Robert McCormick and George Washington.  He is also far more reluctant than Lind to identify Lincoln with either modern-day political party.    Smith told PBS in 2012 during this virtual tour of the new Ford’s Theatre Center, that “everyone wants Lincoln on their side. Almost everyone can devise a rationale to justify that.”  As a former director of several presidential libraries (including the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in Springfield), Smith has a uniquely rich view of how American presidents, in particular, are always “getting right with Lincoln” (a famous line that Smith often quotes from David Donald’s well-regarded 1956 essay in The Atlantic).  Yet even the prudent historian sometimes finds himself invoking Lincoln or other Rushmore figures to comment on present-day political trends.  Just last week, Smith offered NPR a subtle critique of President Obama’s handling of the shutdown / debt ceiling crisis by comparing him to “successful presidents”:

“Successful presidents are defined in part by their enemies, [For] Andrew Jackson, it was the Bank of the United States. [Theodore Roosevelt], it was the ‘malefactors of wealth.’ Ronald Reagan, it was the ‘evil empire.’ This president — it isn’t that he has lacked for enemies. But I think he’s been very reluctant to … play that game.”

Like Richard Norton Smith, Craig Symonds tries to embody the classic scholarly caution about applying the past the to the present.  Symonds taught for years in the History Department at the US Naval Academy.  In fact, Symonds was the guy whom Harrison Ford “shadowed” in 1991 while he was studying up for his role as professor / spy Jack Ryan in the “The Patriot Games.”  Symonds has authored or edited more than 20 history books, mostly on the Civil War or US naval history.  He won the 2009 Lincoln Prize for his book, Lincoln and His Admirals (Oxford, 2008). Yet even Professor Emeritus Symonds occasionally indulges in the inevitable “getting right with Lincoln” parlor game. When asked about leadership lessons that might be derived from Lincoln, Symonds responded pointedly during a recent interview with the Abraham Lincoln Institute at Lincoln Memorial University, that he could name three:  “patience; a willingness to listen, as well as talk; and a sense of humor.  Sadly, all three are sorely in need in our nation today.”

James L. Swanson does not hold a professorship, but he has published one of the most influential books on the Lincoln assassination and its aftermath, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (Harper, 2006) and has edited or authored several historical books, including another fast-paced historical narrative coming out next month on the Kennedy assassination.  Also, even more than any other member of this panel, Swanson has spent a career in and around the federal government and federal policy-making with a special focus on the Supreme Court and constitutional law. Trained as an attorney, Swanson has held positions at the US Department of Justice, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation among others.   He has written frequently about partisan obstruction of judicial nominations, including this 2003 piece in The Weekly Standard which exorciated congressional Democrats for waging unprecedented “preemptive war” against George W. Bush nominees (apparently what was “unprecedented” in 2003 has now become the dysfunctional norm…).  During an interview with Scholastic, Swanson emphasized Lincoln’s self-made qualities as a prescription for all modern-day Americans.  “Lincoln once said that he was a living example of how a young person could succeed through hard work,” Swanson reported, “and he was right.”

“What Would Lincoln Do? Understanding How Lincoln Gets Used (And Abused) in Today’s Washington” is a free public panel that will take place at Ford’s Theatre on Tuesday, October 15, 2013, from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.  Tickets may be reserved at http://www.fords.org/event/what-would-lincoln-do.  Those who cannot attend the panel, may view it online starting on the evening of October 16.  Information about where to obtain access to the video will be available through http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln.

As readers of Blog Divided are well aware, we have been fascinated by the story of Samuel and Bayard Wilkeson, a father and son who were both at Gettysburg, one as a correspondent for the New York Times and the other as a 2LT for the Union army.  The son died on the battle’s first day after being wounded by an artillery shell and after amputating his own leg.  The father discovered his son’s body on July 4, 1863 following more than a day of intense searching.  Then he wrote a passionate, angry account of what happened for the New York Times, which closed by resolving that the dead at Gettysburg had “baptised” with their blood, the “second birth of Freedom in America.”  President Lincoln knew the Wilkesons. The story of the family’s tragedy echoed across the North during the summer of 1863.  So the connection to Lincoln’s famous phase in the Gettysburg Address, “a new birth of freedom,” seemed overwhelming, intentional, and eminently teachable.  We first posted about the story of the “Angry Father” in July 2010, but then followed up with more details in the summer of 2013, here and here.  I spoke about the Wilkeson family during the 150th anniversary commemorations for the Battle of Gettysburg and have been featuring the story in numerous K-12 workshops during the last five years, typically through this handout.

Matthew Pinsker from Gettysburg Foundation on Vimeo.

But there’s been one nagging concern that we just have not yet been able to fully resolve.  What exactly did Sam Wilkeson look like?  The problem is that there are multiple images attributed to him but they don’t seem to align properly.  I brought this up at the final seminar session of the “Understanding Lincoln” open, online course and asked for help, in true “class-sourcing” fashion.  Remarkably, within a few hours, I got a very helpful lead from course participant Martha Bohnenberger, a social studies teacher from South Carolina.

Here is the problem that first disturbed me in the summer of 2013.  The House Divided Project has been using this striking 1859 image of Sam Wilkeson (on the top left) taken by Alexander Gardner, discovered and cleaned up by project co-founder John Osborne, courtesy of the online collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.  Yet the Buffalo News profiled the Wilkesons this past summer because the family were Buffalo natives  and they used the image on the top right –clearly not the same person– to represent Sam Wilkeson (undated, no source citation).  I presume they obtained this photograph from the Buffalo History Museum, but I haven’t yet tracked it all down. By the way, Buffalo was a nineteenth-century city partly founded by the grandfather in this story, Judge Samuel Wilkeson, Sr., who had hailed from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Dickinson College is located.  However, there is even more about the image to consider.  The Gettysburg National Military Park features the story of the Wilkesons inside their main museum experience at the Visitor’s Center, but they use an entirely different image reportedly of newspaper correspondent Sam Wilkeson, which they credit to the National Archives (on the bottom left).  Meanwhile, Martha Bohnenberger discovered this illustration (bottom right) in the New York Sun from December 3, 1889 as part of an obituary for Wilkeson –read it, he led a truly remarkable life– by doing some shrewd online research at the Library of Congress site, Chronicling America.  Again, it’s different.

Sam Wilkeson (Smithsonian)

Sam Wilkeson (Buffalo News)

Sam Wilkeson (Archives)

Sam Wilkeson (New York Sun)

Now, I am not willing to bet my tenure on this, but I think that the Smithsonian Wilkeson (1859) is the same as the New York Sun Wilkeson (1889), just bearded in that latter illustration.  The lines of the face, however, strike me as almost identical.  But I don’t quite know what to make of the National Archives Wilkeson or the Buffalo News Wilkeson.  The image quality isn’t quite good enough for me to decide, but they seem (especially the Buffalo Wilkeson) to be a different person (and probably different from each other as well).  What do you think?  There’s certainly more researching and phone calling to do, which I haven’t yet accomplished, but I appreciated the quick extra help from my class-sourcing exercise the other day and would like to continue to seek help if others would provide it.  Feel free to comment here and leave your opinion, or contact me directly by email (pinskerm@dickinson.edu) to share any insights.

On Tuesday evening, July 7, 1863, Abraham Lincoln responded to a “serenade” from a crowd outside the White House celebrating the wonderful news  received in Washington earlier that day that Vicksburg had finally surrendered to Union forces (actually on the Fourth of July, Independence Day). Speaking extemporaneously, the president struggled to find the right words to put the twin victories –Vicksburg and Gettysburg– into context.

How long ago is it? –eighty odd years– since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.”

Ever since, many Lincoln scholars have noted –though not nearly enough classroom teachers have realized– that this “Response to a Serenade” from July 7, 1863 stands as an especially compelling “first draft” for the Gettysburg Address, whose famous opening lines delivered just over four months later on November 19, 1863 clearly owed their origins to Lincoln’s desire to revise and improve what for him had been a somewhat awkward initial effort:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

But there’s even more to this “first draft” story than most Lincoln scholars have acknowledged.  It appears very likely that Lincoln was working at least in part from another man’s text as he contemplated how to answer that boisterous serenade on Tuesday evening, July 7.  Sometime the night before or earlier that day, the president probably read and was inspired by what historian Harold Holzer is now calling “the greatest piece of war reporting ever,”  a stunning dispatch from Gettysburg written by a New York Times correspondent whose eldest son had died tragically on that first day of the great battle.

The story of the reporter, Samuel Wilkeson, and his son, Bayard, is also reasonably well known to Civil War scholars and Gettysburg buffs, but nonetheless remains absent from most American textbooks and classroom discussions.  Yet the reason why Holzer is featuring it in his next book (on Lincoln and the press) and why we have been focusing so much attention on it here at House Divided (see our earlier posts here and here), is because of the many layers of human drama involved.  Lt. Bayard Wilkeson was 19-years-old when an artillery shell nearly severed his leg around mid-day on July 1, 1863 north of the town , along what is now known as Barlow’s Knoll (see image above).  The brave young man was then forced to amputate his own leg before he ultimately died from shock that evening while in Confederate custody.  Meanwhile, his father Samuel had been trying to rush up to the battlefield to report on General Meade and the Army of the Potomac as they entered into combat with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.  Sam Wilkeson spent two anxious days reporting from Meade’s headquarters and wondering what had happened to his son, knowing only that Bayard had been wounded and captured.  Eventually, Wilkeson found his dead boy on Saturday evening, July 4, and wrote his lead dispatch for the New York Times  with these memorable words:

Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly absorbing interest  -the dead body of an eldest born crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not stay?

Wilkeson then produced a dramatic and detailed account of the battle, which was published on Monday, July 6, 1863, and which he closed in this stirring fashion:

Oh, you dead who at Gettysburg have baptised with your blood a second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied.

To read the full text of Samuel Wilkeson’s article, go to the House Divided research engine, or click here

This story raises a profound question:  was Wilkeson’s “second birth of Freedom in America” a line that Lincoln was recalling and intentionally evoking when he closed his own Address at Gettysburg on November 19 with the phrase, “a new birth of freedom”?  The National Park Service displays relics from Bayard Wilkeson’s death, including the sash he used as a tourniquet, and they provide a text panel showing the opening of his father’s famous dispatch (later turned into a pamphlet, Sam Wilkeson’s Thrilling Word Picture of Gettysburg), but they refrain from making any direct connections between Wilkeson’s account and Lincoln’s address.  Most scholars have so far been equally reticent about making that interpretive leap.

Yet that is surely too much scholarly caution.  Holzer confirms that during the Civil War Lincoln had same day or next day access to the New York Times, and while nobody knows for certain if Lincoln read Wilkeson’s dispatch before he replied to the serenade, there are a handful of good reasons for believing that he did.  First, he and his aides knew Sam Wilkeson quite well.  The story of Bayard’s death and his father’s dramatic reaction is one that would have transfixed them as it did nearly everybody else in the North.  But second, and more important, Lincoln appeared to allude to the episode in his brief remarks on Tuesday evening, July 7:

I would like to speak in terms of praise due to the many brave officers and soldiers who have fought in the cause of the Union and liberties of the country from the beginning of the war … [but] I dislike to mention the name of one single officer lest I might do wrong to those I might forget. Recent events bring up glorious names, and particularly prominent ones, but these I will not mention.

Perhaps the president was referring here to General John F. Reynolds or other tragic losses from the battle, but I believe this is a direct reference to the Wilkeson sacrifice.   One certainly cannot ignore the fact that the sentiment Lincoln offered here of not mentioning names later became the guiding principle of his Gettysburg Address.  On November 19, 1863, Lincoln mentioned nobody by name.  He offered no specific details.  Ordinarily, we warn students against abstractions and encourage them to be as concrete as possible in their writing.  Lincoln was anything but specific in his Gettysburg Address.  However, like many great writers, he was thoroughly evocative.  Those last lines of the Address were especially evocative for nineteenth-century audiences, not only paraphrasing Daniel Webster’s famous Second Reply to Hayne (“It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s Government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people” (January 26-27, 1830), but also  –I would argue– paraphrasing the “greatest piece of war reporting ever” from Samuel Wilkeson.  Even if we will never know the full truth behind the “first draft” of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, I hope more teachers see the value in bringing up this poignant and powerful story in their classrooms and letting students decide for themselves.

Stories like this one and many others like it that help bring to life Lincoln and the Civil War provide the animating spirit behind our latest project –the creation of a new multi-media edition of Lincoln’s Writings that we are launching on July 7, 2013 (marking the 150th anniversary of Lincon’s “first draft” of the Gettysburg Address).  The multi-media edition will include 150 of Lincoln’s documents that I have dubbed his “most teachable.”  The pages of this site will be populated with all kinds of digital tools, such as audio recordings of the documents in Lincoln’s voice (by Dickinson College theatre professor Todd Wronski), interactive maps, clickable word clouds, and videos of me conducting close readings of the top 25 key documents (starting with the Gettysburg Address, ranked naturally as #1).   This has been a big project with excellent work from many people, most notably House Divided co-founder John Osborne, our technical director Ryan Burke, and Dickinson College undergraduates Russ Allen and Leah Miller.  The multi-media project itself will then become the focal point of the “Understanding Lincoln” open, online course that we are currently preparing to offer this summer and fall in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.  Students in that course will work toward building out the Lincoln’s Writings website with an anticipated first-stage completion date of November 19, 2013 (not coincidentally marking the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address). Registration for that course closes on July 19, 2013.  A full credit graduate section is available and designed especially for K-12 educators.  Please check out the new Lincoln’s Writings website and watch specially designed close reading videos, like the one below, with me explaining Lincoln’s writing process for his Gettysburg speech and the Wilkeson connection to the Address:

Matthew Pinsker: Understanding Lincoln: Gettysburg Address (1863) from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.