President Abraham Lincoln stepped down onto the train platform of Gettysburg station in Pennsylvania at around six o’clock in the evening of November 18, 1863, as the sky was already darkening. The train ride from Washington, D.C. had been long, nearly six hours, much of which he spent feeling weak, dizzy, and suffering from a headache. He mentioned the matter to John Hay, his assistant private secretary.

Lincoln had not left Washington easily, and he was not entirely well. His youngest son, Tad, had come down with a fever before the departure, which some historians would later suspect was an early bout of the same smallpox now taking hold of the president’s body. Mary, Lincoln’s wife, had pleaded with her husband not to go. She had good reason to. They had already buried two sons: three-year-old Eddie, in 1850, and Willie, at eleven years old, just two years prior.

Still, Lincoln went. Gettysburg had not been the same town since the battle in July. About seven thousand men had been killed, many hastily buried in the July heat, in shallow graves that would soon have to be opened again. In some places, blackened hands, arms, and legs protruded from the earth, what Pennsylvania’s Governor described as “the devil’s own planting… a harvest of death.” Thousands of dead horses were also burned or buried outside of town. The stench of it all had made people sick for miles around.

In the weeks after the battle, the work of giving the dead a proper burial fell to David Wills, a thirty-two-year-old attorney in the town. Wills purchased seventeen acres on Cemetery Hill and then had the dead from the hasty battlefield graves moved to proper plots at the cost to Pennsylvania of $1.59 per body. Then he wrote to Lincoln on November 2nd, asking him to attend the cemetery dedication on the 19th of the month and to deliver, as the letter put it, “a few appropriate remarks.”

Lincoln accepted…

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