The Wheatfield
It’s one of the greatest pieces of oratory in the history of spoken language. It’s barely three paragraphs. It contains just 271 words, but if there are verses of American scripture, these are surely foremost among them.
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.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- 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.
The words need little help, but they do indeed receive it from the place where they were first spoken aloud by President Abraham Lincoln, November 19th, 1863, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
It’s ironic that part of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address predicts that it will soon be forgotten, and perhaps this ironic prediction serves to add to its renown. He made the prediction, however, because he felt the weight of the place as well as anyone. It was more than 7,000 members of The Army of the Potomac, organized and deployed on his orders, along with over 7,000 members of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia who opposed them, that now lay buried a few feet beneath the feet of those gathered to hear him. So many people died there that bodies were still being found more than 70 years later, the last in 1939.
I have wanted to visit the site of the Battle of Gettysburg for years, ever since seeing the movie with amazing performances by Martin Sheen as General Robert E. Lee, Tom Beringer as General James Longstreet, Jeff Daniels as Colonel Robert Lawrence Chamberlain, and many others who brought those terrible days to life on the big screen.
The decisive moment of the battle is known as “Pickett’s Charge.” Several brigades of about 12,000 Confederate troops, led by General George Pickett–portrayed brilliantly by Stephen Lang in the movie–took cover behind rocks and trees across a large wheatfield from about 6,000 Union troops in a highly advantageous position on a ridge above. Robert E. Lee ordered General Pickett to march across the field to take the Union ridge.
Standing there, you realize how far these soldiers had to go. It was a distance longer than 13 football fields, slowly marching shoulder to shoulder in long, orderly lines, all the while being shot at with rifles and cannons. There was no way to take cover–these 12,000 troops knew that there was a near certainty that they’d lose either their limbs or their lives as they walked together into the waves of bombs and bullets crashing over them.
The battlefield is a national park now. You wouldn’t know it was anything other than a small rural Pennsylvania town if not for the large granite monuments placed all over that commemorate events and participants in the battle. The piles of amputated limbs are gone–buried beneath the field hospitals where they were taken from wounded soldiers. The 5,000 dead horses piled in a heap and burned. People like Elizabeth Thorn, pregnant at the time, buried more than 100 soldiers in graves herself in the spot where they fell, later to be exhumed and removed to the cemetery consecrated during Lincoln’s address.
158 years later I stood in the very place where it all happened, the very place where so many died. Staring at the spot for five, then ten, then fifteen minutes, I just couldn’t comprehend it. How did they do it? How did they find the courage to leave the shelter of those trees, line up shoulder to shoulder, walk across that enormous field, and–if they were one of the very few that even made it that far–up that hill?
It was the strangest experience. I felt awestruck at the courage of those men marching into mortal danger, but I also felt angry that their commanders would order them to do it, and that their politicians convinced them that it was necessary. I felt angry that those commanders and politicians, who were the ones who owned slaves, ordering soldiers to die to protect their right to own them, even though the vast majority of those soldiers couldn’t even dream of ever owning a property that would benefit from slave labor.
I know that the Civil War wasn’t just fought over slavery–there was a larger debate over whether the federal government had the authority to impose laws over a state government. In fact, blame could go all the way back to the founders, who in their eagerness to protect themselves from tyrannical kings, they wrote a Constitution that was long on stating what that government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” could not do, and pretty short on what it could.
In the end, the wealthy delegates to the Continental Congresses found a way to make sure that no king or ruler of any kind could take their money or goods without their permission. Four score and seven years later, when the government began to talk about taking away the wealthy’s stuff through taxing them and emancipating their slaves, the non-wealthy were sent in to fight and die to prevent it.
Lincoln told those assembled on that November day in 1863, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” He went on to extoll the virtues of the Union they died to preserve, and as a resident of that Union, I am indebted to them.
As a disciple of Jesus Christ incorporated into God’s mighty acts of salvation and looking forward to the kingdom of God coming on earth as it is in heaven, I share the hope that we’ll never forget. I hope we’ll remember not to celebrate a victory that preserved a nation, but to mourn the brokenness that sees people as expendable for the causes of our choosing, to push back against the laziness that prevents us from collaborating to find a better way, and to eradicate the greed that lets us profit from it.
