This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Up next, the story behind the story of Lincoln's greatest speech, the Gettysburg

address. And we rely a lot on a terrific book called the Gettysburg Gospel by Hungarian-born

historian Gabor Barrett, who was the director at the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.

And I have a particular love affair with Gettysburg

because my dad went to college there.

And I have walked the battlegrounds

and taken trips all the way down to Vicksburg with my dad.

And now the story behind the story of the Gettysburg Address.

Thank you. the story behind the story of the Gettysburg address. He arrived in the small Pennsylvania town on November 18, 1863, the day before he was to give

one of his few national addresses. He wasn't alone. Gettysburg population at the time

was less than 3,000, but nearly 15,000 people would gather the very next day at the official

dedication ceremony of the National Cemetery on the site of one of the bloodiest and most

decisive battles of the Civil War.

President Abraham Lincoln arrived early because he wanted to see the battlefield.

To see in person what he had only seen before on maps and official reports.

He wanted to see the ground and walk the ground.

It is said that it is a place if you let it where the land

will speak to you. It spoke to Lincoln. He visited the battlefields by carriage with only a few people

wandering the grounds for hours. Only four months earlier in early July, an even larger gathering of humanity made its way

to those very same battlefields.

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