New York - The Novel

significance of the Battle of Gettysburg. Before July 1863, after all, both sides might have been getting sick of the war, but the Confederacy was still on the offensive. Down on the Mississippi, General Grant had so far failed to take the Confederates’ mighty fortification at Vicksburg. Bold General Lee and Stonewall Jackson had taken on a Union army twice their size on the Potomac River, and though Jackson had died, Lee and his Confederate army had swept through Maryland and into Pennsylvania, threatening both Baltimore and the capital.
    But then, on the Fourth of July, had come the double victory for the Union. Vicksburg had fallen, at last, to Grant, and Lee’s army, after a display of matchless courage, had been smashed and turned back at Gettysburg.
    The North had the initiative. The South was open to massive attack.
    Not that the war was won. By no means. The riots in New York, after all, had been only the most extreme expression of a widespread Union dislike of the war, by then. The will of the North might crack. The South might yet outlast them. The government in Washington knew it very well.
    The dedication of the new cemetery at Gettysburg had been important, therefore. A ceremony was called for. A big story for the newspapers. A fine speech.
    The speech had been entrusted to the president of Harvard, the greatest orator of the day. Only later, as a courtesy perhaps, did anyone think of asking Lincoln himself to attend. Indeed, Theodore remembered, he and the other photographers hadn’t been too sure that Lincoln was coming at all.

    “But come he did,” he remarked to the journalist now. “There was a big crowd, you know, governors and local people and all the rest. Maybe fifteen thousand altogether. Lincoln rode up with the Secretary of State, I think, and Chase, the Treasury Secretary. Then he took his place with the others, just sat there quietly with his tall hat off, of course, so that we could hardly see him. I’d caught a glimpse of him when he came to make his address at the Cooper Institute, when he was still clean-shaven, but I hadn’t seen him with his beard before. Anyway, there was some music, and a prayer, so far as I remember. And then the president of Harvard rose to speak.
    “Well, that was quite a speech, I can tell you. He gave full measure—two and a half hours—and when he finally came to his grand peroration, the applause was like thunder. Then there was a psalm sung. Then Lincoln rose, and we could see him well enough.
    “Now we knew he wouldn’t be speaking for long—we’d had the big speech—so we got ourselves prepared, myself and the other photographers, pretty quick. But I dare say you know how that is done.”
    It had been no easy business getting a picture in the Civil War. The photographs were always taken in 3-D, which meant that two plates had to be inserted simultaneously into a double camera, one to the left, one to the right. The glass plates had to be quickly cleaned, coated with collodion, then, while still wet, dipped in silver nitrate before being put into the camera. The exposure time might only be a few seconds, but then one had to rush the plates, still wet, into the mobile darkroom. Quite apart from the difficulties of having people in motion during the seconds of exposure, the whole process was so cumbersome that taking pictures of battlefield action was almost impossible.
    “Well, dammit, I’d heard the first words of his speech—‘Fourscore and seven years ago’—and I was on it, preparing my wet plates. And I’d finished ahead of the other fellows, and slipped them into the camera, and was ready to go, when I heard him say, ‘… that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ Then just as I was getting him in my sights, he stopped. And there was silence. Then he looked down at one of the organizers and said something. Seemed as if he was apologizing—he looked kind of discouraged. And then he sat down. Everyone was so surprised that they hardly even got round to clapping. ‘Was that it?’ said the fellow next to me, who was still trying to get the plates into his camera. ‘Guess so,’ I said. ‘Jeezus,’ he said, ‘that was fast.’ Of course, that speech is pretty famous now, but the audience didn’t think anything of it at the time, I can tell you.”
    “So you got no picture of the Gettysburg address?” said Horace Slim.
    “Not a damn thing. Nor did anyone, so far as I