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ANNE KENNEY: Hello, everyone. I'm Anne Kenny. I'm the Carl A. Kroch university librarian here at Cornell, and I'm very, very excited to welcome you here this afternoon. Exactly 150 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln stood in front of a crowd at Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and said 270 or so words that we now know as The Gettysburg Address. Lincoln himself thought that no one would mark the occasion of his speech. He said so. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.
Cornell's copy, only one of five in Lincoln's own hand, was created in February 1864 when George Bancroft, the most famous historian of his day, asked the president to write out a copy of the address. He wanted it for a lithographed volume that would be auctioned off as a fundraiser for Union soldiers in Baltimore. When Bancroft saw that Lincoln had copied the text on both sides of the paper and that the president hadn't provided a title or even signed it, he knew it wouldn't work for the volume he had in mind.
Bancroft had the unenviable task of going back to the president to ask him to write it out again and provided him with specific instructions for doing so. Lincoln obliged. That new copy of the address wound up with the Cuban ambassador, who later gifted it to the people of the United States, and it now resides in the Lincoln Room in the White House.
Bancroft kept his original version, which he willed to his grandson, Wilder Bancroft, a Cornell chemistry professor, who kept it here at Cornell in his faculty home, located where the Statler Hotel now stands. Sometime during the Depression, Wilder sold his copy to a New York City dealer. It sold again, this time to Nicholas H. and Margaret Lilly Noyes. They gave the manuscript, now known as the Bancroft copy, to Cornell University Library in 1949.
We're grateful for that gift and grateful to be here tonight to commemorate this anniversary in words and song. Before we proceed, I'd like to remind you to silence your cell phones and to please note where the nearest emergency exits are. First on our program tonight, we'll start with a panel of three of our own esteemed faculty members, who will be discussing the address.
They are Margaret Washington, professor in the Department of Africana Studies, American studies, and religious studies. Shirley Samuels, professor in the Department of English, visual studies, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and American studies. And Edward Baptist, associate professor in the Department of History. Please welcome Margaret to the podium.
[APPLAUSE]
MARGARET WASHINGTON: Thank you, Anne, and good evening, everyone. Can you hear me OK? I'd like to make one small correction. I am in the Department of History, not Africana. I am in American studies and religious studies, but my main home department is history.
For us, the living, Abraham Lincoln's address at the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is considered one of the greatest speeches in American history. Like most of Lincoln's well-known speeches, the Gettysburg Address has many quotable passages that resonated then, today, and will for years to come. I'd like to focus for just a few minutes on one passage that reflects a recent experience I had. "It is for us, the living," said Lincoln on November 19, 1863, "To be dedicated to the unfinished work that they began."
Last night I was on another panel. This one was at the Cinemapolis Art House in downtown Ithaca. It was a special showing of a movie, 12 Years a Slave. It's based on the autobiography of the same title about Solomon Northup, a free black New Yorker who was kidnapped in 1841 and spent the next 12 years in slavery in the Louisiana region of the Red River Valley. The movie theater was filled, and scores of people had to be turned away.
After watching the movie, which is, by the way, not for the faint hearted, we had a panel discussion that included myself, Professor Carole Boyce Davies in the Africana department here at Cornell, Professor Sean Eversley Bradwell at Ithaca College, and two of Solomon Northup's descendants, who happen to be white. Following the panel's presentations, we had a riveting audience talk back about many issues.
We talked about the flaws in the movie, how it presented enslaved black women as despairing victims, how the only white woman in the movie was a viciously cruel plantation mistress. The fact that there was no representation of the rich, vibrant collective culture that African Americans created on the plantations in bondage, the folk tales, the folk songs, the dances, the spirituality, and traditions of black life and culture that survive to this day. And we talked about the lack of resistance of slavery that was so uncharacteristic of the actual experience. So there were a number of flaws.
But we panelists, and many in the audience, also praised the movie. Why? Because it peeled away some of the true to life complexities of human interaction during slavery. That while some slave holders were demonic, others were humane. But that humanity mattered little in the overall scheme of a system perpetuated by, sustained by, and indeed thriving upon the almighty dollar. So much so that a free black family man from Saratoga Springs, New York trying to make a little extra money with his fiddle could end up in the most stinking hellhole of oppression as a slave.
And that the movie, like the autobiography, did indeed have a silver lining for Northrup, thanks to a white man who had gone south to work as a carpenter. A white man who believed, as he said in the movie and in the book, all men and women should be free. It was a general sentiment of many of us that while there was a silver lining for Solomon Northup and that was good, what about the other four million enslaved men, women, and children left behind?
Well, for the four million people whom Solomon Northup left behind in 1853, consider as President Skorton reads the Gettysburg Address what that symbolized 10 years later in 1863 for that mass of humanity. Freedom was one, and by the way, only one of the Gettysburg Address's most important meanings. And in celebrating the magnificence of the Gettysburg Address, we should not forget that it took Lincoln some time and some deep, provocative soul searching to come to the conclusion that the words represent in terms of black emancipation in terms of invoking the Declaration of Independence as opposed to the Constitution and dedicating the fallen men to the new national creed, as Lincoln then envisioned it.
The Gettysburg Address was written for posterity. From out of the past, Lincoln called upon future generations and us the living to strive to make freedom and equality closer to the reality of our times. And perhaps because it is closely based on a true story, I see 12 Years a Slave, like other freedom narratives, as helping us remember and hopefully advocate the principles of freedom. "The nation," said Lincoln, "was founded on the proposition that we are all created equal."
Now, proposition is a theory. But he goes on to say that we have to transform the theory into a reality. We the living should dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work that others have begun. In Lincoln's time, it was the black and white abolitionists, it was the men and women, such as Solomon Northup who told their stories to the nation, and finally, it was the soldiers whom Lincoln invoked at Gettysburg.
And Lincoln himself saw his speech as a means of serving notice on the nation that he intended to transform the executive order known as the Emancipation Proclamation into the 13th Amendment. And while he did not live to see it, his vision of free and equal was further codified in the 15th Amendment. But the freedom won was soon lost and had to be re-won. During the times that historian Taylor Branch calls the King years, a host of individuals, organizations, elected officials, and so on rededicated themselves to the proposition within the Gettysburg Address.
So the Gettysburg Address is a living document. Certainly that is what the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. believed when he invoked it 50 years ago. And we as a nation are still striving. As we become more multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious, and transcend gender categories, we can expand the meaning of the Gettysburg Address in ways that Lincoln never dreamed but nonetheless prepared the way for. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SHIRLEY SAMUELS: Do be careful if you go see 12 Years a Slave. Yeah. It's intensely moving and brings out history. My brief remarks today concern birth, death, and photography. First birth.
We all know the words. This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. I want to add to these familiar words a perhaps unfamiliar question, drawing on my background as a feminist scholar of cultural norms. What kind of conception was this? Who conceived? Conception suggests that there might have been a woman somewhere, giving birth to the nation whose birth is heralded in this address. Perhaps liberty.
The process that led to the mention of conception in this address, the process that brought Lincoln on the train to Gettysburg immersed in the thought that became his short presentation in front of living mourners, emerges from death. To remember the blood that has been spilled on the ground before the crowd is to present the ache of losing those who were loved, but these deaths also present a loss of further possibilities for conception.
Second, death. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate this ground. The ground holds bodies, bodies that have barely been buried, bodies on whose looted corpses remain photographic images that are all they retain of the family members they have left behind. Sometimes the only way that their identities can be traced.
So third, photography. As with the story of the man whose photograph of three children was found on his body as he lay unremarked on the field of death, since newspapers could not then reproduce photographs, it was an engraving of the children that was disseminated. And through the image of his children, they found his identity.
What links these topics is the matter of how both bodies and images are reproduced. The report is that the audience at Gettysburg could barely hear the remarks Lincoln made. The dissemination and effect of the address had everything to do with its reproduction in newspapers. Newspapers consumed at home and that brought the war home through texts and images.
The war at home had already happened in the town of Gettysburg. The town was occupied and then strewn with corpses. The townspeople furious that they were commandeered to bury the bodies. The smell of rotting bodies filled the streets.
What nation can be conceived in liberty when the birth is a site of death? What kind of consecration can be called down? This nation, said Lincoln, shall not perish from the earth when the earth is saturated with the blood of those who have perished. The concept that you can find a principle of the people, by the people, for the people necessarily involves both life and death.
What happened in this land of the dead? Bodies lay on Cemetery Ridge on Little Round Top in the peach orchard. Bodies were dug out of rock to be posed for the photographer. Alexander Gardner dragged a rifle around to pose with bodies for his collection, a copy of which is also held here at Cornell, the photographic sketchbook of the Civil War. Two key images from that collection are on view on the walls of Olin now displaying corpses from two angles.
But which bodies are Union soldiers and which are Confederates? The photographer shifts ground, trains his lens on the same body from a different direction, and calls them enemies of each other when they are in fact the same bodies. That may be the point. In the Civil War cemetery at Elmira, for instance, 30 miles from here, there is a separation of bodies. So some look North and some look South, but they are buried together, and we do not know by looking whose side they were on.
Why does it still matter to stop and remember the elements of language, place, history? To tell this story of the Civil War, a story that merges lost, longing in the formulations of history. The first president of Cornell, Andrew Dickson White, kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from the war, now also held here in the archives.
I began by asking in question that through the reference to fathers invoked by Lincoln raises a question that for me was fairly obvious. Where were the mothers in this birth of freedom? Looking at the relation of bodies to land as these bodies were then lying so recently buried, I also want to ask about how through the pain of childbirth does one bring forth a nation? Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
EDWARD BAPTIST: Thank you. Thanks and welcome, again, to all of you. I just have one main point to add to this discussion, and here it is. We think of the Gettysburg Address as something old. Sometimes we think of it as something quaint. And I know we shouldn't say that today. Something we store in a vault. Maybe not today, but many days. Something we bring out and read only on special occasions, every 50 years or so. Put it back. Don't touch it.
You look at Google Ingram, in fact, you can see that we actually talk about it a lot less than we used to talk about it. Maybe not today, now that Cornell has all these hits on Google, but it's right there. Try it. Try Ingram if you don't believe me. And even when we did talk about it more, I'm not sure that we collectively got it.
I'm not sure that we understood its significance. Some historians have even argued that because they say slavery would have ended on its own for economic reasons by 1900 or so, the Civil War was a gigantic waste of blood and treasure, which would pretty much make the Gettysburg Address irrelevant.
Well, I say no. The Civil War, Union victory in the Civil War, and the kind of Union victory that happened, not just a halfway victory, not a negotiated peace, but one that really was a new birth of freedom, one that not only produced but depended on a commitment to emancipation, that enlisted on those who were in the process of being emancipated and emancipating themselves, one that depended on the end of slavery. This was, in fact, one of the two key turning points I would argue in US history and maybe in human history since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Well, without these victories and without these kinds of victories, what would have happened? Well, like many other thinkers in the late 1700s, Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations, considered by many to be the founder of modern thought about capitalism, thought slavery was inefficient. The work done by free men comes cheaper than work by slaves, as slaves' work can only be squeezed out of him by violence and not by any interest of his own.
As the world of the Industrial Revolution dawned, awakened to the possibility of increasing economic efficiency, many Europeans and Americans believed, with Thomas Jefferson, that nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people, enslaved African Americans, are to be free. But by 1860, anyone with eyes could see that in some ways, they were wrong.
The 19th century up to that point was proving them wrong. Slavery when linked to the growing Industrial Revolution that transformed the economies of Europe and the United States turned out to be incredibly profitable. And whatever the book of fate said, the millions of people whom slavery's expansion enriched were willing to cover the writing on the page with, as Lincoln said in a memorable analogy, a coin of gold. Well, the fact is that we wildly underestimate the power of slavery to corrupt, to persuade people to abandon ideals of liberty and natural rights.
In 1800, there were 800,000 people enslaved in the US and about three and a half million in the whole Western hemisphere. Many, as I said, believe that the 19th century then dawning would be a century of emancipation, especially after the US and Britain banned the international slave trade from Africa by 1808. But the next 50 years would see three million Africans illegally transported as slaves from Africa, mostly to Brazil and to Cuba, and another one million moved to more profitable slavery regions within the US.
Despite the French and the British abolishing slavery within their own empires in 1848 and 1834 respectively, the number of enslaved people in the Americas probably doubled to about seven million by 1860. Cuban enslavers dominated world sugar production, Brazilian ones world coffee production, and biggest and most powerful of all was the US slavery sector. It now controlled four million people and produced 70% of the world's cotton. Cotton was the global economy's most widely traded good, its most important industrial raw material the oil of the early 19th century and the US South had a monopoly of it.
And contrary to what Adam Smith assumed, but which Solomon Northup could certainly have explained to him, actual data shows that enslaved laborers pushed harder every day made cotton more efficiently than free people. White Southerners in the cotton states were on average the wealthiest group of people of their numerical size in the entire world. They controlled 1/3 of all US wealth in the form of slaves alone, leaving out land and other property, and everybody wanted to lend to them. Slavery was massively profitable by 1860, and it was growing.
And this means that what Lincoln's Gettysburg Address marked was something of tremendous significance in world history. But what was the alternative, if the war had not happened? What was the alternative if the North had not won, if enslaved people themselves and their Northern allies had not pushed to make emancipation a war goal? What was the alternative if the blue lines had not held in July 1863? And what was the alternative if Abraham Lincoln, pushed by others and pushing himself, had not decided to accept emancipation as not only war policy but, as we see in the Gettysburg Address, the core principle of a reborn United States and a rewritten Constitution?
Well, the alternative was, as Lincoln put it, a United States that was no longer half one thing and half another, half slave and half free, but all one thing, all slave. Slavery was growing, and its proponents had a plan to turn even the free states into defenders of slavery. They were using the federal courts to make free state Americans into enforcers of slavery, just like non slave holding whites in the southern states. And we can, if we think about it, then imagine a 20th or 21st century even where slavery persisted.
So we should remember that this was a possibility, and we should be glad that because people acted, many of them dying in consequence, that possibility did not become reality. And we should remember the terrible alternatives that the US and the wider world would have endured if slavery here had survived and grown and bent all of American society and culture and law completely to its shape. It has taken 15 decades to come even as far as we have come in unbending those metals from the curve of the chain, and still we are not done. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ANNE KENNEY: I want to thank all of you for those just really excellent presentations. Next, we're honored to have Cornell's 12th president, David J. Skorton, here to read the Gettysburg Address in full. President Skorton holds faculty appointments as professor in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Med and in Biomedical Engineering here in the College of Engineering. He's a seasoned administrator, board certified cardiologist, biomedical researcher, but for tonight, we're most pleased that he's also a musician and a strong advocate for the arts and humanities.
I do want to point out that David will be reading the address based on our Bancroft copy, which includes the words under God in the phrase that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. Some of you may have caught the flak President Obama has received for his reading of the address as part of a website put together by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. President Obama was asked to read from the first draft, the Nicolay copy, which did not include the words under God. The first two copies of the Gettysburg Address do not include those two terms, but the last three, including ours, does. David, I'm thinking this should take you about two minutes to do, right?
[LAUGHTER]
Please join me in welcoming President Skorton.
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID SKORTON: I'm just so happy that the other president took the flak. That's great.
[LAUGHTER]
"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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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 here 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."
[APPLAUSE]
ANNE KENNEY: Thank you, David. And last, the Cornell Glee Club is here to perform a song director Robert Isaac commissioned just for this occasion. It's written by preeminent American composer, Toby Twining, and it celebrates Lincoln's sense of rhythm and the texture of his words. I believe Toby Twining is here with us tonight, and we thank him for this creative piece and eagerly anticipate its debut. So gentlemen.
[VOCALIZING]
GLEE CLUB: (SINGING) Four score, four score and seven and seven and seven years ago, years ago. Our fathers brought forth, our fathers brought forth, brought forth on this continent, continent a new nation, nation, nation, a new nation, nation, nation, a new nation, nation, nation, a new nation, nation, nation, a new nation, nation, nation, a new nation, conceived in liberty. A new nation, nation, nation, a new nation conceived in liberty. A new nation, nation, nation, a new nation conceived in liberty.
A new nation, nation, nation conceived in liberty. Conceived in liberty, conceived in liberty, conceived in liberty, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition, proposition, and dedicated to the proposition, proposition, and dedicated to the proposition, proposition. And dedicated to the proposition, proposition.
And dedicated to the proposition, dedicated proposition, dedicated to the proposition, dedicated, proposition, dedicated to the proposition, dedicated, proposition, dedicated to the proposition, dedicated, proposition, dedicated to the proposition, dedicated, proposition, dedicated to the proposition. Dedicated, proposition, dedicated to to the proposition, dedicated, proposition, dedicated to the proposition, dedicated, proposition, dedicated to the proposition, dedicated, proposition, dedicated to the proposition, dedicated, proposition.
Engaged. Engaged. Engaged. Civil, civil. Engaged. Engaged. Engaged. Engaged. Civil, civil. Engaged. Engaged. Engaged. Engaged. Civil, civil. Engaged, engaged. Engaged.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. Now we are engaged in a great civil war. Now we are engaged in a great. Now we are engaged in a great. Now we are engaged in a great civil war. Testing whether that nation, nation so conceived and dedicated can long endure. Engaged, engaged. Engaged, engaged.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. Now we are engaged. Can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. Testing whether the nation, a nation so conceived and dedicated can long endure. Now we are engaged in a great. Now we are engaged in a great. Now we are engaged in a great civil war.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met on a great battlefield 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. That that nation might live. That that nation might live. That that nation might live.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. Battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field. A portion of that field. Of that field. As a final resting place.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
That that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. This ground, this ground, this ground, this ground, this ground, this ground, this ground, this ground.
The brave men, living and dead who struggled here. Have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. This ground. To add or detract. This ground. Struggle. This ground. Struggle. This ground. Struggle. This ground. The brave men. This ground. Struggle. This ground. Struggle. Who struggled here. This ground. Struggle. This ground. Struggle. This ground. Who struggled here. This ground. This ground. Struggle. Struggle. Struggle.
The world will little note nor long remember what we said 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. That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they the last full measure of devotion.
That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That we here highly resolve that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.
And that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people.
And that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people.
And that government by the people and that government by the people and that government by the people. Shall not perish, shall not perish, shall not perish from the earth, from the earth.
[APPLAUSE]
ANNE KENNEY: Wow.
[LAUGHTER]
I want to invite you on behalf of my successor to repeat that at the bicentennial of the Gettysburg Address.
[LAUGHTER]
I want to thank you all for coming tonight. This has been just absolutely wonderful. And I'd like to invite all of you to continue the celebration at a reception and a viewing of our exhibition put together by Lance Heidig. Which features our original manuscript of the address it's in Kroch Library. It's just across the arts quad. You can enter through the doors of Olin Library and follow the hallway back down to the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Again, let's give thanks to all of our participants tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
Abraham Lincoln's most famous speech was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863, during the Civil War. Cornell University has one of five known manuscript copies of Lincoln's handwritten speech.
To commemorate the 150th anniversary, University Librarian Anne R. Kenney and Cornell University Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections held a faculty panel discussion and a reading of the Gettysburg Address by President David J. Skorton. The faculty panel included Edward E. Baptist, associate professor of history; Shirley Samuels, professor of English and chair of history of art; and Margaret Washington, professor of history.
Following the reading, the Cornell Glee Club performed "Lincoln the Musician," composed by Toby Twining and directed by Robert Isaacs.
