In 1963, the Battle of Gettysburg’s 100th Anniversary drew tens of thousands of visitors to the battlefield. Among the activities of the Centennial was the dedication of new statues and monuments. A large crowd attended the dedication of a new plaque added to the statue of the Irish Brigade Chaplain Fr. William Corby. The statue itself was more than a half-century old, but given the many tourists in town that week, a re-dedication ceremony of sorts was planned. The invited speaker was Father Ted Hesburgh. He was the president of Notre Dame University, a position Corby himself had held after the Civil War. Hesburgh was a well-known academic and public intellectual. During a Gettysburg Centennial which saw segregationists like Alabama Governor George Wallace praise dead Confederates for defending the “Southern way of life,” Hesburgh struck a decidedly different tone in his speech.
Father Theodore Hesburgh gave the keynote speech at the dedication of the plaque on the monument to Father Corby. The speech began with an account of the General Absolution given by Corby before the Irish Brigade went into the Wheatfield to fight and die. Hesburgh next quoted Corby:
Father Corby himself wrote a quarter of a century later: “That general absolution was intended for all, not only for our brigade, but for all, North or South, who were susceptible of it and who were about to appear before their Judge. Let us hope that many thousands of souls, purified by hardships, fasting, prayer and blood, met a favorable sentence on the ever memorable battlefield of Gettysburg.”
What does all of this drama mean to us, a hundred years later, as we stand on the same battlefield~ The least that might be expected is that we would understand, today, what Father Corby called “the noble object for which they fought”…and died. We too await our judgement.
Hesburgh then quoted from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, ending with the president’s declaration that the Union dead had given the “last full measure of devotion” so that the country might see a “new birth of freedom.” Hesburgh asked who this freedom won at the cost of so many lives was for. Here are excepts from his speech:
This, I take it, is what the Civil War was all about, it was for freedom, and specifically for the freedom of Negro Americans, that it was fought. If we forget this unfinished business, then there well be nothing but mockery in this Centennial celebration. We will have missed the deep and tragic issues that cost so many lives.
The priest quoted popular historian Bruce Catton:
“The Civil War meant that the Negro slave would become an American citizen and it left us with the eternal, inescapable obligation to see to it that that citizenship is made good •••Winning that freedom for the Negro, we won it also for all the people who then or ever would become Americans–including ourselves. We can never have permanently a second-class citizenship in America. Because of the Civil
War, we are not that kind of country ••• We bought that commitment at the price of 6oo,ooo lives. It is something we can never ignore.”
Hesburgh insisted that his audience understand their obligation to finish the work begun at Gettysburg:
…each one of us must be, in these our times, great emancipators, to finish up as completely and as dramatically as possible, in our own communities across the land, the, unfinished business of which Lincoln spoke here: the work of freedom.
Our President has now spoken out upon the moral issue that faces us all. Our Congress has before it a bill [the Civil Rights Act] that attempts to hasten the completion of the unfinished business. There may well be another battle of Gettysburg in the Congress, but in the end the issue must be settled as it was settled here, for we are a nation committed to the proposition that all men were created equal. Anything less than that is unworthy of the thousands of men who died here. But when all the laws have been enacted, when all of the judgements of the Supreme Count are assessed, when all the Presidential speeches are recorded, there still remains the real unfinished business. Individual Americans died here, and only individual Americans can make that for which those soldiers that died come true in their own communities.
Moral issues must be recognized, in individual hearts and consciences. The appalling dearth of freedom for millions of Negro Americans today, in voting, in employment, in housing, in education, in public accommodations, and in the administration of justice, is not something automatic. It is a positive act;
it is freedom denied by one American to another American, and until every white American decides to act morally towards every Negro American, there is no end to the unfinished business.
…The heroic deeds are done. Gettysburg is cloaked in peace. But the issue raised bloodily engaged here still clamors for a final answer. There are six times more Americans in America now than there were at the time of the Civil War. Can we give a final answer at long last. Can we finally make freedom live for all Americans? Only if each one of us dedicates ourselves to the great task still 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 shall have a new birth in freedom.
This, I believe, is the true challenge of Gettysburg today. May all Americans hear it deeply in their hearts and souls and may they ponder the real depths of this greatest domestic challenge of our times which can be expressed no better than President Lincoln expressed it in terms of human equality: Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived can long endure.
Battlefields are like this. They confront us, as they confronted the brave men who made this place a landmark of heroism, with the ultimate of all moral tests: survival.
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