The battlefield of Gettysburg was made sacred by the men who died there for Freedom's sake and also by the men who died there for the sake of what they honestly thought were the rights of the Slave States. Congress made the battlefield a Soldiers' Cemetery. It was to be dedicated to its great memories on November 19, 1863. The morning before a special train left Washington for Gettysburg. It carried President Lincoln, Secretary of State Seward, two other members of the Cabinet, the two private secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, the distinguished Pennsylvanian, Wayne MacVeagh, later U. S. Attorney-General and later still our Minister to Italy, and others of lesser note. Among those latter was the Hon. Thomas Strong, who had been made one of the party by Lincoln's kind thoughtfulness. It was he who afterwards told his son the story of Lincoln's Gettysburg speech, scarcely regarded at the moment, but long since recognized as one of the masterpieces of English literature.
The little town of Gettysburg was in a ferment that November night, when the President's train arrived. It was full of people and bands and whisky. Crowds strolled through the streets, serenading statesmen and calling for speeches with an American crowd's insatiable appetite for talky-talk. "MacVeagh," says Hay, "made a most beautiful and touching speech of five minutes," but another Pennsylvanian made a most disgusting and drunken speech of many minutes. Lincoln and most of his party of course had no share in all this brawling merriment. He and Seward had talked briefly to shouting thousands early in the evening.
On the way up from Washington, the President had sat in a sad abstraction. He took little part in the talk that buzzed about him. Once, when MacVeagh was vehemently declaiming about the way the Southern magnates were misleading the Southern masses, Lincoln said with a weary smile one of those sayings of his which will never be forgotten. "You can fool part of the people all the time; you can fool all the people part of the time; but you can't fool all the people all the time." Then he became silent again. He did not know what he was to say on the morrow. The chief oration was to be by Edward Everett of Massachusetts, a trained orator, fluent and finished in polished phrase. He had been Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to England, Secretary of State, United States Senator. He was handsome, distinguished, graceful. The ungainly President felt that he and his words would be but a foil to Everett and his sonorous sentences, sentences that were sure to come rolling in like "the surge and thunder of the Odyssey." Everett had graduated from Harvard, Lincoln from a log-cabin. Both must face on the morrow the same audience.