On Blood-Soaked Ground, a ‘Prayer for the Future’ of a Divided Land

The bugler’s call to assemble had sounded, wreaths had been laid, a choral society had sung and dignitaries had spoken, all on a blood-consecrated hill in the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. All to commemorate the 161st anniversary of the speech that came to epitomize what it meant to be presidential.

On Nov. 19, 1863, on this very hill, President Abraham Lincoln unfolded his six-foot-four frame to stand and dedicate a national soldiers’ cemetery made necessary by the horrific Battle of Gettysburg just four months earlier. His 272 words became a civic prayer of unity and purpose for a nation riven by civil war: the Gettysburg Address.

Now, exactly two weeks after a contentious presidential election that seemed only to widen the American divide, it was the daunting honor of a Lincoln scholar named Harold Holzer to channel the 16th president and recite his immortal words. He, too, is bearded, but he grew up in the borough of Queens, not the woods of Kentucky, and he stands five-foot-nine, maybe.

Mr. Holzer knew the address almost as well as he knew the Shema, the Jewish prayer. Even so, he had fretted in the days leading up to this moment. “I don’t have the voice for it,” he had said.

The timing of the ceremony, so soon after the election of a once and future president, left Mr. Holzer mourning how starkly the understanding of “presidential” had changed between then and now. Between a man known as “Honest Abe” and a man with 34 felony convictions; between one who summoned “the better angels of our nature” and one who referred to his opponent as “retarded” and undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”