It was a cold afternoon in November, the leaves long since dry on their branches and turned to red and brown and gold, many already departed and lay on the grass like the bodies that had been reburied only a month earlier. Abraham Lincoln stood at the podium, his beard doing little to hide his mournful, haggard face. Before him were the notes for a speech that began "four score and seven years ago" and progressed into all manner of patriotic doggerel, but his heart refused to find purchase in it. Damn it all, he thought to himself, this was no mere presidential debate but the dedication for a grave; one where many young men were laid to rest in the name of his own ideals. That they met their end at the hands of slave-owning secessionists made little difference to him; they were dead at his hands all the same. Something about a prepared speech felt basically wrong—disrespectful, even.
He looked out over the crowd, feeling or imagining his growing malaise reflected in their looks of impatience. He cleared his throat nervously, leafing through his notes briefly and ultimately discarding them. There was nothing for it. War had come to his United States and these fine people were owed an explanation. Would not his words ring hollow if he could not provide them assurance that the Union would indeed endure; would continue to endure for many decades hence? To him it was no question. If the evidence existed it must at last be provided. He began.
"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers were visited by a chocolate-colored labrador retriever whose name was Buddy. This dog proved evident that our Union should not meet its end in this great civil war, but that it should long endure; for this dog was the friend and companion of a President of these United States many years yet to come, in a time when great metal trains shall traverse our skies and books shall be made up of lights and provide us only with the illusion of substance."
The crowd's reaction surprised him little—the sea of faces now looked at him as though his brain were addled by the smallpox. Perhaps it was. It affected the veracity of his story not at all, however. He continued.
"When first Buddy came to consecrate this ground, twas on the evening of the seventeenth of June, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and two. Our third president was in his home at Monticello, entertaining none other than Benjamin Franklin. Only then did Providence open its mighty jaws and spit forth this dog. Content he was at first to merely observe, as our great nation did at the abominable practice of slavery, but true to the country of his birth he could not but watch in silence at the proceedings. No doubt my words meet with some measure of skepticism—were I in your shoes I would accept not a whit; nevertheless the hour has come in which this strange tale must be recounted entire. Though the repute of these giants of men upon whose shoulders I now stand be called into question by the telling, take heart that this be not my intent and that the Almighty has seen fit to preserve our Union well through the far-off year of nineteen hundred and ninety-seven."
He could already sense the furious scribblings of the journalists in their notebooks and was sure that they would call him mad. But would they call him mad the less if he faltered here? The Rubicon had been crossed, he thought. No course remained but the one he had set. Let them call him what they may; he would prove on this day that no mere civil war could put asunder what God had laid forth that April morning in Concord when Thomas Gage unwittingly birthed the mightiest nation ever seen upon the Earth.