gettysburg address

ALBANY ― Albany Civic Center Director John Mazzola outlined plans to incorporate updated rates at the facility and create a better rate of recovery on tax money spent in what City Manager Alfred Lott jokingly referred to as Mazzola's "Gettysburg Address on the civic center" during an Albany City Commission work session Tuesday morning.

Citing "poor past practices" of former civic center management, Mazzola told commissioners rates at the venue had not been adjusted in 10 years.

"During my first year on the job, each time an attempt was made to invoice for full labor or any service provided per the 1997 rate card (that was then in effect), it was met with resistance by each client, whether commercial or not-for- profit," Mazzola said.

Fighting what he said was referred to in the industry as the "booking ballet," Mazzola said he has come under fire from the community for trying to bring the civic center rates more in line with similar state and regional venues, even though his actions were taken in an effort to recoup taxpayer money used to supplement the venue.

"I work very hard behind the scenes ― but in a goldfish bowl, usually with a lightning rod attached ― to craft a fair lease agreement that protects our taxpayer investment in the course of booking events and attractions into our venues," Mazzola said. "It is oftentimes a tedious and delicate balancing act."

Lott told commissioners Mazzola was following marching orders when he raised rates at the civic center.

"I put him in that goldfish bowl to take some lighting strikes," the city manager said. "The rate increases he implemented were directly related to my direction."

Commissioners generally praised Mazzola's attempts to recoup some of the $2.1 million in taxpayer money ($1.2 million of which comes from yearly bond payments that will end in 2011) that has been spent each of the last three years to operate the civic center. But they offered suggestions to avoid what Commissioner Dorothy Hubbard called "public relations nightmares" that have surrounded the rate increases.

"I just wish Sunday's article in the Herald (explaining the new rates) had come prior to the changes being made," Hubbard said. "We need to be sure the public is aware of what we do."

Commissioner Bo Dorough, who joked that Mazzola's "treatise was actually longer than the Gettysburg Address," encouraged the civic center director to come up with consistent rates that could be used across the board.

"Clearly, taxpayers don't want, nor should they be expected, to pay for events that are held at the civic center," Dorough said. "We certainly want to help the nonprofit organizers, but it's fair that they pay the costs of events they sponsor. We need to be consistent and fair; that is essential.

"Once the bond is paid off, if we get manageable policies in place, the civic center will be less of a white elephant and more of an asset."

Following Albany Police Department, Albany/Dougherty Drug Unit and Code Enforcement reports, after which Adams reiterated his call to have recidivist criminals banned from the county as part of their probation, commissioners heard complaints from William Wright about the proposed occupational tax that was later discussed at a public hearing at the government center.

Assistant City Manager Wes Smith and Lott discussed a planned citizen survey that will allow people in the community to have a say on city employees' performance. Smith said 3,000 surveys would be sent to "demographically selected" citizens, from which Lott said "we'll get actual input on the services we provide."

The commission tentatively voted to name Andrew Reid to the Water, Gas & Light Commission board to fill the unexpired term of Amit Singh, OKd alcohol license applications for the Bald Eagle convenience store on Ledo Road and Blue Skies Eatery & Gift Shop on Newton Road, and held public hearings on rezoning requests on Johnson Road, Pointe North Boulevard and Sands Drive.

Commissioners also voted to approve a $57,306 bid by Floor Mechanix of Albany to complete carpet and vinyl installation at Community & Economic Development housing units. The bid was originally awarded to Diversified Inc. but was shifted to Floor Mechanix due to nonperformance by the original contractor. Boyd Brothers Construction Co. was awarded a Fourth Avenue Street reconstruction project with a $78,199.50 bid.

Votes taken will not be final until the commission's Sept. 25 business meeting.

With the right final answers for host Meredith Vieira and an effective use of her three lifelines, first-year law student Jaclyn Sexton won $25,000 on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" Monday.

A native of North Attleboro, Mass., Sexton participated on the national TV show, testing her knowledge for a shot at the million-dollar top prize. She quit after stalling at the $50,000 question, which asked her how long it would take to type up the Gettysburg Address at a 40-words-per-minute pace.

And while that was tricky, Sexton said getting on the show was more difficult.

Aspiring "Millionaire" contestants first have to sign up online and take a 30-question multiple-choice quiz, Sexton said. If they receive a passing score, the network might then arrange a personal interview.

"They ask questions about what you would do with the winnings and they just want to get an general overview of your personality," she said. "An application can be on hold for up to two years. Fortunately for me, it was a quick turnaround. The whole process only took two months."

In that two-month span, Sexton said she prepared for her appearance by brushing up on trivia.

"I played Trivial Pursuit a lot, but other than that, there is no real way to study," Sexton said.

The only other way to prepare herself for Vieira's questions was her careful selection of her phone-a-friend lifeline. "Millionaire" allows its contestants one phone call to a friend from a preset list of contacts if the player on the hot seat is stuck on a question.

Sexton said she chose five friends "who knew a lot about things I didn't."

"My cousin Steve, the one I used [on the show], knew a lot about geography," she said.

Since the show was taped in July, Sexton had to sign a confidentiality agreement saying she would not reveal what happened or how much money she won until the episode aired.

Now free from that promise, Sexton said Monday she particularly enjoyed meeting Vieira, who also co-anchors NBC's "The Today Show," backstage. She called Vieira "one of the nicest people I've ever met" and said the "Millionaire" host sent her a note after Sexton finished taping her segment, thanking her for participating on the show and wishing her good luck at Notre Dame.

Sexton said she would use her winnings to pay for law school.

"Unfortunately, as a law student, I have a lot of debt to pay off," she said. "I paid off some credit card bills, car payments, things like that."

And despite not receiving the title of "millionaire" from the show, Sexton had only positive things to say about her experience.

"I had a fantastic time," she said. "The staff [of the show] was amazing. I'd do it again tomorrow if they would let me."
It takes a rare speaker to rouse a Liberal Democrat conference. Admittedly the venue is terrible. The hall in the Brighton centre would have deadened the Gettysburg address. If Hitler had held his rallies here, the Nazis would have died in a mire of indifference.
Now and again speakers try flights of oratory, but it has the same effect as throwing a toaster into a pond full of dead carp - there's a bit of a splash but nothing happens.


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They were debating tax yesterday morning: reduce the standard rate by 4p, cane the rich, but even that didn't excite them.
They talked about VED, LIT, LVT and SVR, and everyone in the hall knew what they meant. But nobody even murmured, still less chanted, "What do we want? Site value rating! When do we want it? As soon as circumstances make it advisable!"

There are strange, Lib Dem moments. For example, delegates are allowed to queue up and make impromptu contributions to debates. Only a few wanted to. So the chairman appealed: "Not many people are sitting in the intervention seats. I shall ask the interveners to stand by."

Then suddenly Brian Sedgemore was among them. Brian, you may recall, was the leftwing Labour MP who switched to the Lib Dems at the last election. The defection did not create much excitement and, to be frank, I had largely forgotten him until yesterday morning, when he gave a speech of magnificent lunacy, a demented, raving, over-the-top paean of hatred to his old ally Gordon Brown.

Gordon was a chameleon, a lizard, who had sold out to the "loathsome money brigade". Aristotle would have got his number. Aristotle knew a thing or two about friendship; he knew you could judge a man by his friends.

And who was Gordon's best friend? Why, it was Damon Buffini, the private equity tycoon and multimillionaire, a man possessed of "shedloads of money, the noughts dancing dizzily in front of his eyes", someone who paid tax at a lower rate than his own cleaner.

Gordon had even put him on to his new quango, the Business Council for Britain, "which will advise the government on how private equity bosses can turn hundreds of millions in their personal bank accounts into billions".

This was what the audience wanted - none of this dreary nonsense about the relative merits of LIT and LVTs.

"It's rare even in modern politics that one sees this kind of iniquity," he continued. Did Gordon really believe that Damon would one day come in and sit beside him on the famous Downing Street sofa?

Here I must be careful. Mr Sedgemore kindly gave me the original copy of his remarks, which is a bit like having Churchill's blood, sweat and tears speech with the handwritten emendations. It turns out that Mr Sedgemore had actually toned it down. In the "ur" text, he imagined Mr Buffini screaming with remorse: "Gordon, Gordon, I can't go on like this...I wake up sweating! Everybody hates me! Gordon, you've got to help me! What about redemption and forgiveness? Christ, Gordon, where is it all going to end? Do it, do it, Gordon! Tax me until my pips squeak! Then lay me low with your big clunking fist!"

And on this bizarre note, he stood down to a sound quite unfamiliar at this conference - loud, sustained and enthusiastic applause.

Alan Greenspan is arguably the financial world's most important figure of the past 50 years.

Born before the Great Depression, he lived through the American Century and witnessed first hand many of its defining moments. For nearly 20 years he was charged with plotting a course for the US economy and was a central character in the drama of some of the greatest stockmarket booms and busts ever seen.

In exclusive extracts from his new book, The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan tells the story of his years as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, starting with the crash of 1987.

The 1987 crash

I felt like a seven-armed paperhanger, going from one phone to another. I was not inclined to panic because I understood the nature of the problems we would face.

The response

Our public statement had been painstakingly worded. It was as short and concise as the Gettysburg Address, though possibly not as stirring.

President Bush

I was saddened when I discovered that he blamed me for his [election] loss. His bitterness surprises me. I did not feel the same way about him.

President Clinton

By mid-1995 we had settled into an easy impromptu relationship. I never thought he would reappoint me.

The dotcom era

The dual forces of information technology and globalisation were taking hold.

Inspiration

The concept of irrational exuberance came to me in the bathtub. It's where I get many of my best ideas.

Overheating

It wasn't that I wanted to stand up and shout 'the stock market is over-valued' but I thought it important to put the issue on the table.


President Reagan looks on as Greenspan is sworn in as the chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987


I felt a real need to hit the ground running because I knew the Fed would soon face big decisions. The Reagan-era expansion was well into its fourth year and while the economy was thriving, it was also showing clear signs of instability.

Since the beginning of the year, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen through 2,000 for the first time, the stock market had run up more than 40pc. Now it stood at more than 2,700 and Wall Street was in a speculative froth. The dollar was falling, and people were worried about America losing its competitive edge � the media were full of alarmist talk about the growing "Japanese threat".

I thought a rate increase would be prudent, but the Fed hadn't raised interest rates for three years. Signs of trouble in the economy continued to mount. Slowing growth and a further weakening of the dollar put Wall Street on edge, as investors and institutions began confronting the likelihood that billions of dollars in speculative bets would never pay off.

In early October, that fear turned to near panic. The worst loss was on Friday, October 16, when the Dow Jones average dropped by 108 points. Since the end of September nearly half a trillion dollars of paper wealth had evaporated in the stock market alone, not to mention the losses in currency and other markets.

I was supposed to fly on Monday afternoon to Dallas. That morning I conferred with the Board of Governors, and we agreed that I should make the trip, lest it seem that the Fed was in a panic. There was no telephone on the plane. So the first thing I did when I arrived was to ask one of the people who greeted me from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas: "How did the stock market finally go?" He said: "It was down five oh eight."

Usually when someone says "five oh eight," he means 5.08. So the market had dropped only 5 points. "Great," I replied. "What a terrific rally." But as I said it, I saw that the expression on his face was not shared relief. In fact, the market had crashed by 508 points, a 22.5pc drop, the biggest one-day loss in history and bigger even than on the day that started the Great Depression, Black Friday 1929.

I went straight to the hotel, where I stayed on the phone into the night.

I was not inclined to panic, because I understood the nature of the problems we would face. Still, when I hung up the phone around midnight, I wondered if I'd be able to sleep. That would be the real test. "Now we're going to see what you're made of," I told myself as I went to bed, and, I'm proud to say, I slept for a good five hours.

The next thirty-six hours were intense. I joked that I felt like a seven-armed paperhanger, going from one phone to another, talking to the stock exchange, the Chicago futures exchanges, and the various Federal Reserve presidents. My most harrowing conversations were with financiers and bankers I'd known for years, major players from very large companies around the country, whose voices were tightened by fear.

The Fed attacked the crisis on two fronts. Our first challenge was Wall Street: we had to persuade giant trading firms and investment banks, many of which were reeling from losses, not to pull back from doing business. Our public statement early that morning had been painstakingly worded to hint that the Fed would provide a safety net for banks, in the expectation that they, in turn, would help support other financial companies.

It was as short and concise as the Gettysburg Address, I thought, although possibly not as stirring: "The Federal Reserve, consistent with its responsibilities as the nation's central bank, affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system."

But as long as the markets continued to function, we had no wish to prop up companies with cash. As all this was going on, we were careful to keep supplying liquidity to the system. The FOMC ordered the traders at the New York Fed to buy billions of dollars of treasury securities on the open market. This had the effect of putting more money into circulation and lowering short-term rates.

On Wednesday morning Goldman Sachs was scheduled to make a $700m payment to Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago, but initially withheld payment pending receipt of expected funds from other sources. Then Goldman thought better of it, and made the payment. Had Goldman withheld such a large sum, it would have set off a cascade of defaults. Subsequently, a senior Goldman official confided to me that had the firm anticipated the difficulties of the ensuing weeks, it would not have paid. And in future such crises, he suspected, Goldman would have second thoughts about making such unrequited payments.

It took well over a week for all the crises to play out, though most of them were hidden from public view. Days after the crash, for example, the Chicago options market nearly collapsed when its biggest trading firm ran short of cash. The Chicago Fed helped engineer a solution to that one.

Contrary to everyone's fears, the economy held firm, actually growing at a 2pc annual rate in the first quarter of 1988 and at an accelerated 5pc rate in the second quarter. Economic growth entered its fifth consecutive year.

However, this strong economic growth was not to last. As the 1980s came to an end, the US economy slowed dramatically, and by the early 1990s tipped into recession. To make matters worse, the banking system was in turmoil, with hundreds of small and medium-sized banks failing and giants like Citibank and Chase Manhatten in distress. Meanwhile, the real estate boom had collapsed, causing even more pain.

Nothing we did at the Fed seemed to work. We'd begun easing interest rates well before the recession hit, but the economy had stopped responding. Even though we lowered the fed funds rate no fewer than 23 times in the three-year period between July 1989 and July 1992, the recovery was one of the most sluggish on record. I would see President George Bush every six or seven weeks, usually in the context of a meeting with others but sometimes one-on-one. Before long, the administration began blaming its troubles on the Fed. Supposedly we were choking the economy by keeping the money supply too tight.

When the recession hit that fall, the friction only got worse. "There has been too much pessimism," President Bush declared in his 1991 State of the Union address. "Sound banks should be making sound loans now, and interest rates should be lower, now."

The Fed, of course, had been lowering rates for over a year, but the White House wanted more, faster cuts. Nonetheless, President Bush reappointed me. I think he concluded I was his least worst choice: the Fed itself by all accounts was functioning well, there was no other candidate whom Wall Street seemed to prefer, and a change would have roiled the markets.

The fact was, the economy was recovering, just not in time to save the election.

I was saddened years later when I discovered that President Bush blamed me for his loss. His bitterness surprised me; I did not feel the same way about him. His loss in the election reminded me of how voters in Britain had ousted Winston Churchill immediately after the Second World War. Quite rapidly, however, the dual forces of information technology and globalisation were beginning to take hold, and as President Bill Clinton later put it: "The rulebooks were out of date." By mid-1995, Clinton and I had settled into an easy, impromptu relationship. He believed dotcom millionaires were an inevitable by-product of progress. "Whenever you shift to a new economic paradigm, there's more inequality," he'd say. Now we were shifting into the digital age, so we had dotcom millionaires.

Politics being what they are, I never thought Clinton would reappoint me as chairman when my term ended in March 1996. He was a Democrat and no doubt he would want one of his own. But by the end of 1995, my prospects had changed. American business was doing exceptionally well. GDP growth was starting to revive without a recession. The relationship between the Fed and the Treasury had never been better.

President Clinton set a little challenge for me and for the two Fed officials he appointed at the same time. "There is now a debate, a serious debate in this country, about whether there is a maximum growth rate we can have over any period of years without inflation," the President told reporters. It wasn't hard to read between the lines. With the economy entering its sixth year of expansion, and with the soft landing looking real, he was asking for faster growth, higher wages, and new jobs. He wanted to see what this rocket could do.

Even rising productivity could not explain the looniness of stock prices. On October 14, 1996, the Dow Jones Industrial Average vaulted past 6,000. If you compared the total value of stock holdings with the size of the economy, the market's significance was increasing at a rapid rate: at $9.5?trillion, it now was 120pc as large as GDP.

We'd now seen the Dow break through three "millennium marks"� 4,000, 5,000, and 6,000 � in just over a year and a half. Though economic growth was strong, we worried that investors were getting carried away. It wasn't that I wanted to stand up and shout, "The stock market is overvalued and it will lead to no good." I didn't believe that. But I thought it important to put the issue on the table.

The concept of irrational exuberance came to me in the bathtub one morning as I was writing a speech. To this day, the bathtub is where I get many of my best ideas. After the Dow had broken 6,000, in mid-October 1996, I'd begun looking for an opportunity to speak up about asset values. I wrote the speech so that the issue of asset values accounted for only a dozen sentences toward the end, and I carefully hedged what I had to say in my usual Fedspeak. Yet when I showed the text to Alice Rivlin [director of Office of Management and Budget] on the day of the speech, "irrational exuberance" jumped right out at her. "Are you sure you want to say this?" she asked.

On the podium that night, I delivered the key passage, watching carefully to see how people would react. But the stock market did not slow down, which only reinforced my concern.

The Dow Jones was already nearing 7,000 when the FOMC convened for the first time in 1997, on February 4. Apart from the run-up in the stock market, the economy was as robust as it had been six months before, when I'd resisted the idea of tightening rates. But my concern about a bubble had changed my mind. I told the committee we might need an interest rate increase to try to rein in the bull.

The Fed does not operate in a vacuum. If we raised rates and gave as a reason that we wanted to rein in the stock market, it would have provoked a political firestorm. Then we met again on March 25 and raised short-term rates by 0.25pc, to 5.5pc. In late March and early April of 1997, right after our meeting, the Dow dipped by some 7pc. This represented a loss of almost 500 points, to some minds a delayed reaction to our rate hike. But within a few weeks, the momentum shifted and the market came roaring back. In effect, investors were teaching the Fed a lesson. Bob Rubin [Secretary of the Treasury] was right: you can't tell when a market is overvalued, and you can't fight market forces. We looked for other ways to deal with the risk of a bubble. But we did not raise rates any further, and we never tried to rein in stock prices again.

Margaret Thatcher jolted Britain toward a capitalist paradigm. I first encountered Thatcher at a British Embassy function in Washington in September 1975, shortly after she became the Conservative Party's leader. And an encounter it was. Seated next to her at dinner, I was prepared for a dull evening with a politician. "Tell me, Chairman Greenspan," she asked. "Why is it that we in Britain cannot calculate M3?" I awoke. M3 is an arcane measure of money supply embraced by followers of Milton Friedman.

We spent the evening discussing market economics and the problems confronting the British economy. My favourable initial impressions of Thatcher were reinforced after she became Prime Minister. Elected to that office in 1979, she confronted Britain's sclerotic economy head-on. Her seminal battle was with the miners who went on strike in March 1984 following her announcement of the closing of some unprofitable government-owned coal mines.

Thatcher's embrace of market capitalism gained the grudging acceptance of the British electorate. Her spectacular run was finally undermined not by the general British electorate but by a revolt within the Conservative Party.

She remained bitter toward those who removed her from power.

In the fall of 1994, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair trekked into my office at the Federal Reserve. As we exchanged greetings, it appeared to me that Brown was the senior person. Blair stayed in the background while Brown did most of the talking about a "new" Labour. Gone were the socialist tenets of post-war Labour leaders.

Brown espoused globalisation and free markets and did not seem interested in reversing much of what Thatcher had changed.

In office from 1997 forward, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, heads of a rejuvenated and far more centrist Labour Party, accepted Thatcher's profoundly important structural changes to British product and labour markets.

In fact Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer for a record number of years, appeared to revel in Britain's remarkable surge of economic flexibility.

Copyright ? Alan Greenspan 2007.

Taken from The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan, published by Allen Lane on September 17, 2007 for ￡25. To order for ￡23 (rrp ￡25) + ￡1.25 p&p call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112.

The Gettysburg Address is the most famous speech of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and one of the most quoted speeches in United States history.[1] It was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated the Confederates at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg.

Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to other presentations that day, came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history. In 269 words delivered in just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, create a unified nation in which states' rights were no longer dominant, defined democracy in terms of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and defined republicanism in terms of freedom, equality and democracy.

Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," Lincoln referred to the events of the American Revolution and described the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to dedicate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to consecrate the living in the struggle to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Despite the speech's prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, the exact wording of the speech is disputed. The five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address differ in a number of details and also differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech.





[edit] Background

Union dead at Gettysburg, photographed by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, July 5�6, 1863.
David Wills's letter inviting Abraham Lincoln to make a few remarks, noting that Edward Everett would deliver the oration.The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1�3, 1863) forever changed the little Pennsylvania town � and, for that matter, the history of the United States. The battlefield contained the bodies of more than 7,500 dead soldiers and several thousand horses of the Union's Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia, and the stench of rotting bodies in the humid July air was overpowering.[2]

The burial of the dead in a dignified and orderly manner became a high priority for the few thousand residents of Gettysburg. Initially, the town planned to buy land for a cemetery and then ask the families of the dead to pay for their burial. However, David Wills, a wealthy 32-year-old attorney, objected to this idea and wrote to the Governor of Pennsylvania, suggesting instead a National Cemetery to be funded by the States. Wills was authorized to purchase 17 acres (69,000 m2) for a cemetery to honor those lost in the summer's battle, paying $2475.87 for the land.[3]

Wills originally planned to dedicate this new cemetery on Wednesday, September 23, and invited Edward Everett, who had served as Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, U.S. Representative, Governor of Massachusetts, and president of Harvard University, to be the main speaker. At that time, Everett was widely considered to be the nation's greatest orator.[4] In reply, Everett told Wills and his organizing committee that he would be unable to prepare an appropriate speech in such a short period of time, and requested that the date be postponed. The committee agreed, and the dedication was postponed until Thursday, November 19.

Almost as an afterthought, Wills and the event committee invited Lincoln to participate in the ceremony. Wills' letter stated, "It is the desire that, after the Oration, you, as Chief Executive of the nation, formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks."[5] Lincoln's role in the event was secondary, akin to the modern tradition of inviting a noted public figure to do a ribbon-cutting at a grand opening.

Lincoln arrived by train in Gettysburg on November 18, and spent the night as a guest in Wills' house on the Gettysburg town square, where he put the finishing touches on the speech he had written in Washington.[6] Contrary to popular belief, Lincoln neither completed his address while on the train nor wrote it on the back of an envelope.[7] On the morning of November 19 at 9:30 A.M., Lincoln, astride a chestnut bay horse, joined in a procession with the assembled dignitaries, townspeople, and widows marching out to the grounds to be dedicated between Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase.[8][9]

Approximately 15,000 people are estimated to have attended the ceremony, including the sitting governors of six of the 24 Union states: Andrew Gregg Curtin of Pennsylvania, Augustus Bradford of Maryland, Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, Horatio Seymour of New York, Joel Parker of New Jersey, and David Tod of Ohio.[10] The precise location of the program within the grounds of the cemetery is disputed.[11] Reinterment of the bodies buried from field graves into the cemetery, which had begun within months of the battle, was less than half complete on the day of the ceremony.[12]