Sarah Vowell - The Partly Cloudy Patriot

T here are children playing soccer on a field at Gettysburg where the Union Army lost the first days fight. Playing soccer, like a bunch of Belgiansand in the middle of football season no less. Outside of town, theres a billboard for a shopping mall said to be The Gettysburg Address For Shopping. Standing on the train platform where Abraham Lincoln disembarked from Washington on November 18, 1863, theres a Confederate soldier, a reenactor. Which direction is south? I ask him, trying to re-create the presidential moment. When the fake Johnny Reb replies that he doesnt know, I scold him, Dude, youre from there! Around the corner, the citizens of Gettysburg stand in line at the Majestic Theater for the 2:10 showing of Meet the Parents. Bennett, the friend Im with, makes a dumb joke about Lincoln meeting his in-laws, the Todds. Things did not go well, he says.

It is November 19, 2000, the 137th anniversary of the cemetery dedication ceremony at which Lincoln delivered a certain speech. Four score and seven years ago, Lincoln said, referring to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Always start with the good news.

I could say that Ive come to Gettysburg as a rubbernecking tourist, that Ive shown up to force myself to mull over the consequences of a war I never think about. Because that would make a better storya gum-chewing, youngish person who says like too much, comes face to face with the horrors of war and Learns Something. But, like, this story isnt like that. Fact is, I think about the Civil War all the time, every day. I cant even use a cotton ball to remove my eye makeup without spacing out about slaverys favorite cash crop and that line from Lincolns Second Inaugural Address that it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other mens faces. Well, that, and why does black eyeliner smudge way more than brown?

I guess Gettysburg is a pilgrimage. And, like all pilgrims, Im a mess. You dont cross state lines to attend the 137th anniversary of anything unless somethings missing in your life.

The fighting at Gettysburg took place between July 1 and July 3, 1863. The Union, under the command of General George Meade, won. But not at first, and not with ease. In the biggest, bloodiest battle ever fought on U.S. soil, 51,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing. I am interested enough in that whopping statistic to spend most of the day being driven around the immense battlefield. Interested enough to walk down a spur on Little Round Top to see the monument to the 20th Maine, where a bookish but brave college professor named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain ran out of ammo and ordered the bayonets that held the Unions ground. Interested enough to stop at the Copse of Treeswhere the Confederate General George Pickett aimed his thousands of soldiers who were mowed down at the climaxand sit on a rock and wonder how many Southern skulls were cracked open on it.

I care enough about the 51,000 to visit the graves, semicircular rows of stones with the otherwise forgotten names of Jeremiah Davis and Jesse Wills and Wesley Raikes laid right next to Hiram Hughes. And the little marble cubes engraved with numbers assigned the unknown. Who was 811? Or 775? The markers for the unknowns are so minimal and so beautiful I catch myself thinking of these men as sculptures. Here, they are called bodies. There are slabs chiseled MASSACHUSETTS 159 BODIES and CONNECTICUT 22 BODIES and WISCONSIN 73 BODIES.

So I pay my respects to the bodies, but Ill admit that I am more concerned with the 272 words President Lincoln said about them. The best the slaughtered can usually hope for is a cameo in some kind of art. Mostly, we living need a Guernica to remind us of Guernica. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln said of the men who shed their blood, The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. Who did he think he was kidding? We only think of them because of him. Robert E. Lee hightailed it out of Gettysburg on the Fourth of July, the same day the Confederates surrendered Vicksburg to U. S. Granta big deal at the time because it gave the Feds control of the Mississippi. And yet who these days dwells on Vicksburg, except for the park rangers who work there and a handful of sore losers who whine when theyre asked to take the stars and bars off their godforsaken state flags?

The Gettysburg Address is more than a eulogy. Its a soybean, a versatile little problem solver that can be processed into seemingly infinite, ingenious products. In this speech, besides cleaning up the founding fathers slavery mess by calling for a new birth of freedom, Lincoln comforted grieving mothers who would never bounce grandchildren on their knees and ran for reelection at the same time. Lest we forget, he came to Washington from Illinois. Even though we think of him as the American Jesus, he had a little Mayor Daley in him too. Lincoln the politician needed the win at Gettysburg and, on the cusp of an election year, he wanted to remind the people explicitly that they could win the war if they just held on, while implicitly reminding them to use their next presidential ballot to write their commander in chief a thank-you note.