Did you know that Secretary of State William Seward gave his own “Gettysburg Address” on November 18th, the night before Lincoln’s? Seward spoke to an enthusiastic crowd gathered in the town square. Read his full remarks below:
Secretary of State William Seward’s Speech at Gettysburg
November 18, 1863
Fellow Citizens – I am now sixty years old and upwards; I have been in public life practically forty years of that time, and yet this is the first time that ever any people or community so near to the border of Maryland was found willing to listen to my voice; and the reason was that I said forty years ago that slavery was opening before this people a graveyard that was to be filled with brothers falling in mutual combat. I knew that the cause that was hurrying the Union into this dreadful strife was slavery, and when I did elevate my voice it was to warn the people to remove that cause when they could by Constitutional means, and so avert the catastrophe of civil war that now unhappily has fallen upon the nation, deluging it in blood. The crisis came, and we see the result. I am thankful that you are willing to hear me at last. I thank my God that I believe this strife is going to end in the removal of that evil which ought to have been removed by peaceful means and deliberate councils. I thank my God for the hope that this is the last fratricidal war which will fall upon the country—a country vouchsafed by Heaven – the richest, the broadest, most beautiful, most magnificent and capacious ever yet bestowed upon a people, that has ever been given to any part of the human race.
And I thank God for the hope that when that cause is removed, simply by the operation of abolishing it as the origin of the great treason that is without justification and without parallel, we shall thenceforth be united, be only one country, having only one hope, one ambition, and one destiny.
Then we shall know that we are not enemies, but that we are friends and brothers; that this Union is a reality; and we shall mourn together for the evil wrought by this rebellion. We are now near the graves of the misguided, whom we have consigned to their last resting place with pity for their errors, and with the same heart full of grief with which we mourn over the brother by whose hand, raised in defense of his government, that misguided brother perished. When we part tomorrow night, let us remember that we owe it to our country and to mankind that this war shall have for its conclusion the establishing of the principle of democratic government—the simple principle that whatever party, whatever portion of the Union prevails by constitutional suffrage in an election, that party is to be respected and maintained in power until it shall give place, on another trial and another verdict, to a different portion of the people. If you do not do that, you are drifting at once and irresistibly to the very verge of the destruction of your government. But with that principle this Government of ours—the freest, the best, the wisest and the happiest in the world—must be, and so far as we are concerned, practically will be, immortal.
