Included in the official party at the dedication of what would become Gettysburg National Cemetery, Commissioner of Public Buildings Benjamin B. French contributed a hymn to the program. French’s diary entry describing the day linked the past with the present as he recalled that former President John Quincy Adams’s efforts against slavery had come to fruition with President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom” for the nation. In his diary, French recorded the approval of the crowd to Lincoln’s short but appropriate remarks, which history would enshrine as one of the greatest American speeches of all time.