Sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln’s “few appropriate remarks” at Gettysburg, delivered 150 years ago today, are memorialized on Lincoln Hall on the University of Illinois campus.  One of the biographical panels on the Quad side of the building depicts the president as he spoke.  Pictured as seating directly behind him, according to the manufacturer of the panel in 1912, was an old man named Burke.  So I once wrote, without confirming the name (Lincoln Hall at the University of Illinois. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).  Not so, I soon learned from Wayne C. Temple (Ph.D., Illinois, 1956).  His name was Burns.

One of sculptor Kristian Schneider's terra cotta panels on the exterior of Lincoln Hall.
One of sculptor Kristian Schneider’s terra cotta panels on the exterior of Lincoln Hall.

John Burns, a veteran of the War of 1812, was nearly three score and ten years old when the Civil War came to Gettysburg on July 1, 1863.  Although deemed too old for combat, he grabbed an old flintlock musket and trotted onto field of battle.  His antique swallow-tail coat and stove pipe hat made him an easy target.  Wounded and captured, he survived the battle.

Photographed by Matthew Brady, Burns was featured in Harper’s Weekly, and his story appeared in hundreds of papers across the North.  When Lincoln came to Gettysburg, he asked about the old soldier and soon met him.  If Burns did not sit on the platform when Lincoln spoke, as shown in the Lincoln Hall panel, he at least accompanied the president to the church service at the end of the day.  Later, Lincoln signed an act of Congress giving Burns a pension “for patriotic services at Gettysburg.”

In 1864, Bret Harte, the California poet, celebrated Burns.  “When the rebels rode through his native town,” he was “the only man who didn’t back down.”  By contrast, “all his townsfolk ran away.”  By 1911, even as “Burke” was being pictured in the terra cotta plaque on Lincoln Hall, Pennsylvania erected a bronze monument at Gettysburg for Burns, depicting him rather like Daniel Chester French’s “Minuteman” at the rude bridge in Concord.

But Burns claimed too much.  He not only freely and inconsistently embellished his story, but he also belittled the deeds of others (calling one neighbor “a damned coward, a chicken hearted squaw, a tallow faced sissy”).  For years, Burns, a cobbler by trade, had been regarded by Gettysburgians as eccentric and cantankerous, and today he is often known, erroneously, only as “the town drunk.”

The evidence about Burns, particularly at the battle, is too incomplete and contradictory to separate fact from fiction, as Timothy H. Smith’s John Burns, “The Hero of Gettysburg” (2000) makes clear.  Moreover, as Carl Caldwell, another U. of I. alumnus has pointed out, Margaret S. Creighton has now brought to the foreground others than Burns, in The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle (2005).  But it is the story of John Burns, Gettysburg’s civilian warrior, that became particularly attached to the story of one of the nation’s most memorable texts.  Much of the voluminous literature on that text, as well as graphic depictions of it, are part of the Library’s Illinois History and Lincoln Collections. — John Hoffmann, Illinois History & Lincoln Collections Librarian

A Birthday Card for Albert Camus

Manuscript fragment from "L'Homme révolté" in Albert Camus's hand.
Manuscript fragment from L’Homme révolté in Albert Camus’s hand.

Albert Camus, the French novelist, playwright, journalist, philosopher and Nobel Prize winner was born on this day, November 7, one hundred years ago.

This is a good occasion to highlight a small manuscript fragment from Camus’s 1951 essay L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, translated in English as The Rebel) which was recently re-discovered on the shelves of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library (shelfmark MS Q.216 C15h).

Small graph paper pages in Camus’s hand were pasted on seventeen larger leaves with annotations in blue ink, also in Camus’s hand. These pages appear to be a draft or variants of the fourth section of the essay, titled “Révolte et Art”, and its sub-sections “Roman et révolte,” Révolte et style” and “Création et révolution.” The manuscript pages are followed by a series of six newspaper clippings relating to an exchange of open letters in the weekly review Arts between André Breton and Albert Camus about L’Homme révolté. This fragment, bound in red morocco, was acquired from R. Simonson in 1966. CS

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The Cité du Livre – Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence (France) houses Albert Camus’s archives in its Centre Albert Camus: http://www.citedulivre-aix.com/Typo3/fileadmin/documents/Expositions/centrecamus/

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library Invites Visiting Scholar Applications for 2014-15

The John “Bud” Velde Visiting Scholars Program

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library annually awards two stipends of up to $3,000 to scholars and researchers, unaffiliated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who would like to spend a month or more conducting research with our materials.

The holdings of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library are substantial. Comprehensive collections support research in printing and printing history, Renaissance studies, Elizabethan and Stuart life and letters, John Milton and his age, emblem studies, economic history, and works on early science and natural history. The library also houses the papers of such diverse literary figures as Carl Sandburg, H.G. Wells, William Maxwell, and W.S. Merwin.

For information about this program, how to apply, and to find out more about The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, please visit our Web site at:

http://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/research_fellowships.html

Please contact the Public Programs Manager, Dennis Sears, with further questions about the program or The Rare Book & Manuscript Library:

Or email Dennis: dsears (at) illinois (dot) edu.

Deadline for application: *1 February 2014*.

Thank you!

 Dennis Sears

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library
1408 W. Gregory Dr., Room 346
Urbana, IL   61801

(217) 333-7242, (217) 244-1755 fax