GETTYSBURG, Pa. — The bugler’s call to assemble had sounded, wreaths had been laid, a choral society had sung and dignitaries had spoken, all on a blood-consecrated hill in the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. All to commemorate the 161st anniversary of the speech that came to epitomize what it meant to be presidential.

On Nov. 19, 1863, on this very hill, President Abraham Lincoln unfolded his 6-foot-4 frame to stand and dedicate a national soldiers cemetery made necessary by the horrific Battle of Gettysburg just four months earlier. His 272 words became a civic prayer of unity and purpose for a nation riven by civil war: the Gettysburg Address.

Now, exactly two weeks after a contentious presidential election that seemed only to widen the American divide, it was the daunting honor of a Lincoln scholar named Harold Holzer to channel the 16th president and recite his immortal words. He, too, is bearded, but he grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, not the woods of Kentucky, and he stands 5-foot-9, maybe.

Holzer knew the address almost as well as he knew the Shema, the Jewish prayer.

The timing of the ceremony, so soon after the election of a once and future president, left Holzer mourning how starkly the understanding of “presidential” had changed between then and now. Between a man known as “Honest Abe” and a man with 34 felony convictions; between one who summoned “the better angels of our nature” and one who referred to his opponent as “retarded” and immigrants without legal status as “poisoning the blood of our country.”

“Heartbreaking,” Holzer said.

On that distant day in 1863, mild like this one, Lincoln and other dignitaries had assembled on a creaking wooden platform at the edge of the town cemetery. Reflections of the three July days of bloodshed, culminating in more than 50,000 casualties, were all around — the bullet-pocked buildings, the cannon-scarred fields, the shell-fragment souvenirs sold along the roadside. The transformed town had been left to contend with thousands of dead and dying soldiers.

The invitation Lincoln received to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” had been an afterthought. Then the president, aged by war and the loss of a dear son, ridiculed by some as coarse and apelike, rose. In a clear but reedy voice he began — “Four score and seven years ago” — and finished in about two minutes. He sat down, convinced that his brief words had not found purchase.

But before Holzer could approach the lectern, an annual ceremony within this annual ceremony had to take place. Sixteen people from eight countries — Bhutan, Britain, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Mexico and South Africa — stood as one.

They raised their right hands. They renounced fidelity to any other “foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty.” They vowed to defend the Constitution.

They pledged their allegiance to the United States of America.

With that, an official from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services welcomed “our newest citizens” to sustained applause.