Last Years
Free of political obligations, Everett traveled the country with his family, occasionally giving public speeches in support of the Union and other causes. He was by this time a famous orator, known for both the quality of his text and his outstanding delivery. He took up the cause of preserving George Washington's home at Mount Vernon. His speaking tour raised almost $70,000 for that purpose.
The 1860 election threatened to produce a national crisis, with pro-slavery Southerners splitting the Democratic Party, and threatening secession if a Republican was selected President. The Whig Party no longer existed, but a group of former Whigs formed the Constitutional Union Party, which claimed as its sole principle the preservation of the Union. The Constitutional Union Party nominated John Bell for President, and Everett for Vice President. The Bell-Everett ticket received less than 13% of the vote, mostly in the South.
With the election of Lincoln, the Civil War broke out. Everett, though he had been a moderate on the slavery issue, was an ardent Unionist. He devoted his efforts to raising support for the Union cause through public speaking. In November 1863, when the military cemetery at Gettysburg was dedicated, Everett was the featured speaker. His two-hour formal oration preceded the much shorter, but now far more famous Gettysburg Address of President Lincoln. For his part, Everett was deeply impressed by the concise speech and wrote to Lincoln noting "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."
In the 1864 election, Everett campaigned extensively for Lincoln and the "Union" Party, as the Republicans called themselves that year. He exhausted himself in this effort, and died on January 15, 1865.
Everett died in Boston and is interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Everett also had a love for mathematics as can be seen from a famous quote: ‘In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist there when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven.’
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Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)