President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most famous speeches in American history 150 years ago today, delivering "a few appropriate remarks" to dedicate the new National Cemetery at Gettysburg.
The speech has come to overshadow the establishment of the cemetery, which at the time was a revolutionary development in the relationship of the state to its citizens and marked a turning point in the relation of American citizens and their government with the war dead.
National military cemeteries - most notably Arlington outside of the nation's capital - are such an established feature of the American ethos that it's hard to imagine that prior to Gettysburg, no such thing existed.
Those who fell in war were usually buried hastily by their fellow soldiers - if there was time - or by civilians after the armies moved on. Many remained above ground, out of the way and out of sight, returning to the elements in nature's own time.
There was no system of notifying next of kin beyond letters written home by surviving fellow soldiers.
If family wanted the body buried near home, they had to travel to the battlefield, locate their loved one's grave (not always easy of even possible), exhume it and have it shipped home.
That all changed after Gettysburg.
Volunteer organizations like the Sanitary Commission had already begun an attempt to keep a complete registry of soldiers in military hospitals, so family could have a central clearinghouse to contact to find out the fate of relatives they'd not heard from after battle.
It was an improvement, but by no means perfect.
The lists of soldiers killed may or may not be accurate, the lists being composed on the fly by officers attempting simply to determine the remaining strength of their fighting force.
The demands on surgeons and nurses at the military hospitals immediately after a battle were so overwhelming, record keeping was haphazard at best.
The scale of the carnage after Gettysburg brought the failings of the entire system into stark relief.
Close to 10,000 dead - if they had a grave, it was a shallow one. Most lay in the open, bloating in the hot July sun.
More than 20,000 wounded, groaning for aid.
And then there were the animals.
As Drew Gilpin Foust recounts in her book "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," by July 4, "an estimated six million pounds of human and animal carcasses lay strewn across the field in the summer heat, and a town of 2,400 grappled with 22,000 wounded who remained alive but in desperate condition."
Most of the doctors left as the armies moved south.
Gabor Boritt describes the immediate aftermath of the battle in harrowing detail in the first chapter of his book on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, "The Gettysburg Gspel."
Of the 106 Union medical officers left behind to care for the more than 20,000 wounded, Boritt notes, "perhaps 35 could actually operate."
Surgeons went insane.
And then there were the tourists.
Foust writes, "A focus of wonder and horror, battle sites in fact became crowded with civilians immediately after the cessation of hostilities: besides relatives in search of kin, there were scavengers seeking to rob the dead, entrepreneurial coffin makers and embalmers, and swarms of tourists attracted by the hope of experiencing the 'sublimity of a battle scene' or simply, as one disgusted soldier put it, 'gratifying their morbid curiosity.'"
Alan Guelzo, in his recent gripping book on the battle, "Gettysburg: The Last Invasion," writes of the morbid mercantile business of stripping the field and the dead of valuables.
Guelzo describes what visitors were confronted with in the weeks after the battle: "The open fields were thickly stippled with "everything belonging to soldiers afoot or on horseback, such as caps, hats, shoes, coats, guns, cartridge and cap boxes, belts, canteens, haversacks, blankets, tin cups, horses, saddles, and swords.' Along the Emmitsburg Road, details of Union soldiers from Alex Hays' division began retrieving some 2,500 rifles from where Pickett's men had thrown them away, thrusting them bayonet-down into the ground so that they were 'standing as thick as trees in a nursery.'"
All of that materiel was marketable.
"The line between relic hunting and outright looting quickly disappeared," writes Guelzo. "John Mumma Young, a student at the college, was approached by two local boys who had dug up a Confederate officer's body to cut 'the buttons and lace' from his uniform, and then sell them. The Army of the Potomac's provost marshal general, Marsena Patrick, was infuriated at how intent the locals were 'to sweep & plunder the battle grounds' for things they could sell back to the army. Since abandoned equipment and weapons on the battlefield were, abandoned or not, still government property, Patrick and his officers warned 'citizens visiting the battle-field… against carrying away' blankets, rifles, swords, wagons, horses, or what-not. Finally, by July 11th, Patrick was forced to ask for reinforcements in the form of Pennsylvania militia to cope with the scavengers."
All this amid a stench of death that shrouded the town for miles around.
According to Foust, "Men had become putrefied meat… So many bodies lay unburied that a surgeon described the atmosphere as almost intolerable. Residents of the surrounding area complained of a 'stench' that persisted from the time of the battle in July until the coming of frost in October. A young boy remembered that everyone 'went about with a bottle of pennyroyal or peppermint oil' to counteract the smell."
According to Guelzo, "The stench of decay was inescapable and, wrote John White Geary, 'horrible and beyond description… My very clothes smell of death.'"
Critically, Gettysburg was the first major battle on Northern soil, the first time the realities of the war were brought home to civilians in the Union.
According to Foust, "Gettysburg made the dead - and the problem they represented - starkly visible to northern citizens, so many of whom flocked to the small Pennsylvania town in the aftermath of battle."
As the summer pressed on, the bodies that had been buried kept reappearing.
Dogs and hogs made quick work of the shallowest graves.
Visiting kin searching for loved ones didn't always find them on the first try.
Summer rain storms continued unexpectedly to expose parts of the previously buried.
Non-mercenary visitors to the battlefield were horrified.
This was not how heroes were to enter eternity.
Eventually, town leaders hatched a plan and proposed to Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin a new "National Cemetery" in which the Union dead would be dug up and re-intered at a proper depth, in a proper setting.
As Foust writes, "The establishment of the Gettysburg cemetery marked the beginning of significant shifts in attitude and policy produced by the nation's confrontation with Civil War slaughter."
She explains it was the beginning of a new understanding of the government's obligation to the dead - "With the passage of conscription legislation in 1863, the nation had, for the first time in its history, mandated the obligation of the citizen to fight in its defense; it had mobilized millions of volunteers; now it had an obligation to those who had served. Citizenship represented a contract in which the state and the individual both assumed certain rights and duties, for which either could be called to account."
What was done in Gettysburg became a model for Civil War battlefields across the nation with the national government taking over the logistics - with the help of U.S. Colored Troops.
It established the modern honor of burial in Arlington.
As Foust notes, "The engagement of the Union government in these matters, first made highly visible in the Gettysburg dedication ceremonies, acknowledged a new public importance for the dead. No longer simply the responsibility of their families, they, and their loss, now belonged to the nation."
As much as a speech, today marks a turning point in this nation's treatment of its military dead.