The famous American politician who gave the speech at Gettysburg in 1863 that cast a spell over the audience and earned glowing praise from all observers was born this week (April 11) in 1794.  Which may have you thinking to yourself, “Hey, wait a minute, wasn’t Abe Lincoln born in February?”

Indeed he was, but Lincoln was not the featured speaker at Gettysburg, nor was his speech considered a critical triumph or even a crowd pleaser.  That honor and accomplishment was Edward Everett’s, the man with the April 11^th birthday.

A renowned scholar, diplomat and politician who had been president of Harvard University and had served as a congressman, senator, governor, and secretary of state, Everett was perhaps most famous of all for his oratorical skills. This made him the natural candidate to give the keynote speech at the ceremony honoring the Gettysburg battlefield and the soldiers from both the North and South who had fought and died there.

What’s more, a keynote speech in the 1860s was expected to be entertaining as well as informative; it was supposed to tell a story much as a good book or a feature film would today — and at about the same length. Two hour speeches were the norm back then, giving Everett, who was both a famous scholar and an excellent researcher, sufficient time to describe in intricate detail the three-day battle at Gettysburg, while weaving it into a larger historical theme that reached back as far as the Periclean Age in ancient Greece.  And he spoke entirely from memory in a voice so powerful and melodious that the audience was literally spellbound for the entire two hours.  Everett then sat down to enthusiastic applause, and in the next day’s newspapers the praise was universal.  The Boston Journal called it “brilliant” and “the best history of the campaign which this generation will have the privilege of reading.”

By contrast, Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech — only 272 words long and given in his high-pitched voice — received polite applause and then everyone went home. The next day most papers made buried mention of it inside their editions.

Seven score and nine years later, of course, we all know which speech has stood the test of time.  The Gettysburg Address is considered among the greatest in all of history and has helped make its author a legend.

And, ironically, the one person at Gettysburg who sensed that this might one day be the case was Everett himself.  In a note to Lincoln the day after the ceremony, Everett wrote, “I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”

“So you are the little woman who made this great war,” is how President Abraham Lincoln reportedly greeted Harriett Beecher Stowe when, in November of 1862, she visited the White House in hopes of convincing the president to emancipate the slaves.

Lincoln was referring, of course, to the not-so-little book that Mrs. Stowe had somehow found the time to write between chasing after her seven young children and keeping house in Brunswick, Maine.  The book, which was first serialized in an abolitionist paper, the National Era (to universal disinterest), eventually stretched into 45 chapters and had almost that many characters.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly, as the book was titled, was published this week (March 20) in 1852, and it quickly became the publishing phenomenon of the century.  A year after its publication it had sold more than 300,000 copies, and in the United States alone that number grew to a half-million by 1856.  Translated into 20 different languages, the book also became a worldwide bestseller.

But it was in America that the book’s appeal and resonance was the most profound, especially since the story revolved around an issue that had been dividing the country since its creation — slavery.  Stowe’s book is a heart-wrenching look at the institution of slavery and a brutal indictment of the slave-holding South. The main character, Uncle Tom, is sold to three different masters, including the demonic plantation owner, Simon Legree, who beats Tom mercilessly when Tom, who has a deep and abiding Christian faith, refuses to whip a fellow slave.  Later, when Tom won’t reveal the location of two fellow slaves who have escaped Legree’s plantation, Legree orders Tom beaten to death. The book is also populated with other slaves — most notably Eliza, Cassy and Emmeline — who suffer unspeakable cruelties at the hands of their white masters.

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Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, died this week (Dec. 6) in 1889 in New Orleans.  He was 81.   He had spent the last years of his life in relative comfort, and his reputation, at least in the former Confederate states, had been restored after suffering mightily after the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865.  Southerners criticized Davis for mismanaging the war effort, including refusing to appoint a general-in-chief until very late in the war (Robert E. Lee), and he often appeared aloof and removed from his everyday constituents.  It also was not lost on many southerners that Davis, a former congressman and senator, an honored West Point graduate, a hero of the Mexican War and an extremely effective secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, had been bested in battle by Abe Lincoln, a one-term congressman whose only military experience was, as he himself described it, fighting mosquitoes during the Black Hawk War, which was more skirmish than war.

In the North Davis’s reputation was, of course, even worse.  He was considered an arrogant, racist, slave-owning traitor who had tried but failed to destroy the United States.

Yet the truth is more nuanced.  Having long served in Congress and having served in a presidential cabinet, Davis knew Washington well and was highly respected on both sides of the political aisle for his emphasis on bipartisanship.  He was also a student of history.  He revered the Founders and the Constitution they created, which—as he pointed out—protected the institution of slavery.  He also was a frequent visitor to northern states, where he saw first-hand the economic and industrial power that the North was acquiring—a power that, far from fearing, he hoped the South could one day emulate.

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