{"id":1344,"date":"2013-11-19T13:34:42","date_gmt":"2013-11-19T19:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nonsolusblog.wordpress.com\/?p=1344"},"modified":"2013-11-19T13:34:42","modified_gmt":"2013-11-19T19:34:42","slug":"sesquicentennial-of-lincolns-gettysburg-address","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/2013\/11\/19\/sesquicentennial-of-lincolns-gettysburg-address\/","title":{"rendered":"Sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abraham Lincoln’s “few appropriate remarks” at Gettysburg, delivered 150 years ago today, are memorialized on Lincoln Hall on the University of Illinois campus.\u00a0 One of the biographical panels on the Quad side of the building depicts the president as he spoke.\u00a0 Pictured as seating directly behind him, according to the manufacturer of the panel in 1912, was an old man named Burke<\/span>.\u00a0 So I once wrote, without confirming the name (Lincoln Hall at the University of Illinois<\/em>. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).\u00a0 Not so, I soon learned from Wayne C. Temple (Ph.D., Illinois, 1956).\u00a0 His name was Burns<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/a>
One of sculptor Kristian Schneider’s terra cotta panels on the exterior of Lincoln Hall.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

John Burns, a veteran of the War of 1812, was nearly three score and ten years old when the Civil War came to Gettysburg on July 1, 1863.\u00a0 Although deemed too old for combat, he grabbed an old flintlock musket and trotted onto field of battle.\u00a0 His antique swallow-tail coat and stove pipe hat made him an easy target.\u00a0 Wounded and captured, he survived the battle.<\/p>\n

Photographed by Matthew Brady, Burns was featured in Harper’s Weekly<\/i>, and his story appeared in hundreds of papers across the North.\u00a0 When Lincoln came to Gettysburg, he asked about the old soldier and soon met him.\u00a0 If Burns did not sit on the platform when Lincoln spoke, as shown in the Lincoln Hall panel, he at least accompanied the president to the church service at the end of the day.\u00a0 Later, Lincoln signed an act of Congress giving Burns a pension “for patriotic services at Gettysburg.”<\/p>\n

In 1864, Bret Harte, the California poet, celebrated Burns.\u00a0 “When the rebels rode through his native town,” he was “the only man who didn’t back down.”\u00a0 By contrast, “all his townsfolk ran away.”\u00a0 By 1911, even as “Burke” was being pictured in the terra cotta plaque on Lincoln Hall, Pennsylvania erected a bronze monument at Gettysburg for Burns, depicting him rather like Daniel Chester French’s “Minuteman” at the rude bridge in Concord.<\/p>\n

But Burns claimed too much.\u00a0 He not only freely and inconsistently embellished his story, but he also belittled the deeds of others (calling one neighbor “a damned coward, a chicken hearted squaw, a tallow faced sissy”).\u00a0 For years, Burns, a cobbler by trade, had been regarded by Gettysburgians as eccentric and cantankerous, and today he is often known, erroneously, only as “the town drunk.”<\/p>\n

The evidence about Burns, particularly at the battle, is too incomplete and contradictory to separate fact from fiction, as Timothy H. Smith’s John Burns, “The Hero of Gettysburg”<\/i> (2000) makes clear.\u00a0 Moreover, as Carl Caldwell, another U. of I. alumnus has pointed out, Margaret S. Creighton has now brought to the foreground others than Burns, in The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle<\/i> (2005).\u00a0 But it is the story of John Burns, Gettysburg’s civilian warrior, that became particularly attached to the story of one of the nation’s most memorable texts.\u00a0 Much of the voluminous literature on that text, as well as graphic depictions of it, are part of the Library’s Illinois History and Lincoln Collections. — John Hoffmann, Illinois History & Lincoln Collections Librarian<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abraham Lincoln’s “few appropriate remarks” at Gettysburg, delivered 150 years ago today, are memorialized on Lincoln Hall on the University of Illinois campus.\u00a0 One of the biographical panels on the Quad side of the building depicts the president as he spoke.\u00a0 Pictured as seating directly behind him, according to the manufacturer of the panel in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/rbx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}