I am re-reading Shelby Foote’s massive, three-volume history of the Civil War. Foote, who played the role of courtly southern scholar and mischievous scamp on Ken Burns’ heralded PBS Civil War documentary, was one of my favorite human beings. He was erudite, witty, and—a startling claim for a historian, really—supremely soulful. He could sift through the names and dates and battlefield movements and find the beating heart of conflicted, complex human beings.

One of those human beings was the president of the United States at the time. His name was Abraham Lincoln, and his story has been told a few thousand times and embellished with enough cornpone hokum to transform him into part Mystical Sage and part Jed Clampett.

But Foote made a valiant attempt to find the man. Vilified by the press and by those in his own cabinet, harassed and harried by a thousand petty concerns, and bowed down by the much more weighty personal and political burdens of a disintegrating family and a splintered nation, Lincoln came close to cracking under the strain. But he did not. Instead, he plotted military strategy. He conferred with generals and politicians. And in his free time—often in the middle of sleep-deprived nights—he wrote to keep sane.

It was perhaps inevitable that I would eventually succumb to the lure of Gettysburg. It was the writing—Foote’s and Lincoln’s in particular—that drew me in. They had awakened the slumbering Civil War Nerd within, and so it was that I dragged my family off to the rolling pasturelands of south-central Pennsylvania sometime in the mid 1990s.

It was either that or join a troupe of local Civil War re-enactors, and it’s entirely possible that the sight of me in a Union uniform might have pushed my wife over the edge. God knows that I was overbearing enough at the time with my study of historical maps and my unending fount of Civil War facts and figures. At any rate, against her better judgment, we loaded up the kids in the minivan and headed off to see Gettysburg, to take in those verdant, lush fields on which God-fearing, pious men cordially slaughtered one another.

It was a fiasco. My daughters were young at the time, perhaps seven and five, and the strategy of placating them with ice-cream cones only lasted as far as Cemetery Ridge. The whining ensued all too quickly. We never made it to the Wheat Field, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, or Little Round Top—locations forever emblazoned in my mind.

And we never came close to seeing the gentle rise across which General George Pickett led his bedraggled soldiers in that impossible, doomed charge against well-entrenched Union troops; the most foolhardy, brave, heroic spectacle in U.S. history. I had to envision it all in my mind’s eye, which is what I had been doing for a couple years anyway.

You had to be there. And even being there, we weren’t really there. We were busy, harried, young parents, and life didn’t permit us the luxury of contemplation.

A few months after the bloodbath, Abe Lincoln stood on that hallowed, horrific ground and delivered himself of a short oration. The burial details were still disinterring the corpses at the time, shifting the bones from the shallow, makeshift graves scattered across the pastoral hills of south-central Pennsylvania into the newly commissioned cemetery that Lincoln had come to dedicate. He spoke for only two and a half minutes, and many in the audience were still trying to find their seats when he folded up his notes and strolled away from the podium.

You know the speech. If, like me, you were forced to memorize it in elementary school, you may recall it somewhat disdainfully. The legend—part of the cornpone sage mythology—is that Lincoln wrote the speech on a scrap of an envelope while he was on the train to Gettysburg. He did not. He wrote it during a succession of late nights over a two-week period, at the White House and in his hotel room in Gettysburg.

He labored over the words, substituting “four score and seven” for the more prosaic “eighty-seven,” working hard on the biblical allusions and lilting cadences that provided the underlying music that virtually no one heard at the time. It is, of course, a beautiful little thing, a compact ten-sentence gem of indomitable idealism and lofty language. And it all emerged from a harried life, from stitching together the scraps of scattered thoughts, on fragmented night after night.

Now it is all coming back to me, courtesy of Shelby Foote.

Not much has changed. My life is still busy and harried, although in different ways than when my children were young. I’ve never made it back to Gettysburg, and I don’t know if I ever will. But I think about that speech from time to time. I thought about it in November of 2008 when, impossibly, a black man was elected president of the United States. And I think about it during the late nights and early mornings when I force myself to dig deep, to try to say something worthwhile.

I spend my days in the pragmatic, shallow mines of corporate America. You don’t have to dig deep, but you have to dig frantically, hundreds of little holes as quickly as possible. Then I come home, dog tired, and retreat to my small little corner, walled off from the mundane, and where, like Abe Lincoln, I try to make the words sing.

It is a far too flattering comparison, and I know it. I am not Abe Lincoln. But I’m fairly convinced that the earth I tread is both horrific and holy, and that it’s worth the struggle to search for words that are worthy of the hallowed ground.