Where Lincoln Stood

The most asked question on this battlefield is where Lincoln stood to give the Gettysburg Address, and it is still open. For a century the answer was assumed to be here, at the Soldiers' National Monument, dedicated in 1869 in the middle of the burial semicircle. The assumption was never based on much. When the Lincoln Address Memorial went up in 1912 its own plaque quietly declined to make the claim, saying the address was delivered about three hundred yards from that spot. In 1995 the photographic historian William Frassanito worked back from period images and argued that the speakers' platform had not stood in the national cemetery at all, but over the fence in Evergreen Cemetery, the town's own private burying ground. There is no marker there; the only signpost is a Park Service panel on this side of the fence pointing across it. More recently Christopher Oakley, an animator, built three dimensional models from the six known photographs and reached a third answer: the platform was trapezoidal rather than the rectangle everyone had assumed, the dignitaries sat in a shallow arc rather than a row, and the structure straddled the boundary between the two cemeteries. On his reconstruction Lincoln, when he rose, was just inside the national cemetery. So the ground is contested by a few dozen yards, between a monument that was never meant to mark it and a spot in the next cemetery that nothing marks at all. Nobody present thought to write down the one detail every later visitor would want.