Gettysburg Address (1863): Lincoln's 272 Words That Endured

The Gettysburg Address is the short speech President Abraham Lincoln delivered on 19 November 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg. In about 272 words and two minutes, Lincoln honoured the Union dead and recast the Civil War as a test of whether a nation founded on equality and self-government could survive. It has become one of the best-known speeches in the English language.

Background: a cemetery for the fallen

The battle of 1-3 July 1863 left thousands of dead soldiers in hasty, shallow graves across farms and fields around Gettysburg, a town of about 2,400 people. Pennsylvania’s governor, Andrew Curtin, appointed a local lawyer, David Wills, to organise a proper cemetery for the Union dead. Wills and agents of the Northern states bought 17 acres on Cemetery Hill, next to the town’s existing Evergreen Cemetery, and the landscape gardener William Saunders designed a semicircular layout with graves grouped by state.

Reburial began in late October 1863 and was far from finished on the day of dedication; in total more than 3,500 Union soldiers were eventually interred there. Edward Everett, a former secretary of state, senator and president of Harvard and the most celebrated orator of the day, was invited to give the main address. Lincoln received a formal invitation from Wills in early November to make “a few appropriate remarks” to set the ground apart.

Writing the speech

Lincoln took the invitation seriously. He wrote at least part of a draft in Washington on Executive Mansion stationery, and after travelling to Gettysburg by train on 18 November, he stayed at Wills’s house on the town square, where he revised the text that evening and the following morning.

The story that he scribbled it on the back of an envelope during the train journey is a myth that appeared decades later. His secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay, who were with him, left accounts of a carefully considered speech.

The ceremony on 19 November

A procession went from the town to the cemetery in the late morning, with Lincoln riding a horse. The crowd is usually estimated at around 15,000 to 20,000 people. The programme began with music and a prayer by the Reverend Thomas H. Stockton, chaplain of the House of Representatives.

Everett then spoke for about two hours from memory, a speech of more than 13,000 words that described the battle in detail and placed it in a long historical perspective. After a hymn written for the occasion by Benjamin B. French, Lincoln rose to speak. He spoke for about two minutes, reading from his pages.

His speech was so brief that a photographer setting up his equipment was said to have missed it. A glass-plate photograph from the day, identified in 1952 by Josephine Cobb of the National Archives, shows Lincoln seated on the crowded platform; it is the only confirmed photograph of him at Gettysburg.

The text and its ideas

Lincoln opened with a reference to the Declaration of Independence: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Four score and seven years, 87 years, before 1863 was 1776.

He described the war as testing “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure”. The ceremony was fitting, he said, but in a larger sense the living could not consecrate the ground; the soldiers who had fought there had already done so. He remarked, with modesty that history proved wrong, that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

The final sentence called on the living to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work, so that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The speech never mentioned Gettysburg by name, slavery, the Confederacy or the enemy. Instead it spoke of the nation as a whole and of equality as its founding principle. Many historians, notably Garry Wills, argue that Lincoln used the Declaration’s promise of equality to reinterpret the Constitution and the purpose of the war, which after the Emancipation Proclamation had become a war for freedom as well as union.

How it was received

Reactions in 1863 divided largely along party lines. Republican newspapers praised the speech, and some, like the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts, recognised it at once as a model of eloquence. Democratic papers were often dismissive; the Chicago Times called it embarrassing, and the Harrisburg Patriot and Union referred to “the silly remarks of the President”. In 2013 the Harrisburg paper’s successor published a light-hearted retraction.

Everett himself wrote to Lincoln the next day: “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.” Lincoln replied that he was glad to know that what he had said was not entirely a failure. Soon after returning to Washington, Lincoln fell ill with varioloid, a mild form of smallpox.

The five copies

Five manuscript copies in Lincoln’s handwriting survive, each named after the person who received it:

The Bliss copy, written in 1864, is the only one Lincoln signed and dated, and it is the version most often reproduced. The texts differ in small ways, and contemporary newspaper reports, taken down by reporters, show that Lincoln also added the words “under God” when speaking, a phrase not found in the two earliest drafts.

Legacy

The address was reprinted widely in newspapers within days, and after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 it took on the weight of a testament. By the late nineteenth century it was being memorised in American schools, and it was carved into the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922.

Its phrases have been echoed far beyond the United States. The closing words about government of the people, by the people, for the people have been quoted as a definition of democracy, and the 1958 constitution of the French Fifth Republic describes the principle of the Republic in almost the same terms. Speakers in the civil rights movement drew on it as well; Martin Luther King Jr opened his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 with the words “Five score years ago”, a deliberate echo of Lincoln.

Historians have long debated why so short a speech had such influence. Part of the answer lies in its form: plain words, mostly of one or two syllables, carefully balanced phrases and a rhythm suited to being read aloud. Part lies in its argument, which presented the Union dead not simply as defenders of a government but as the means by which the nation would gain “a new birth of freedom”. By linking the sacrifice at Gettysburg to the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln gave Americans a way to understand the war’s terrible cost.

The Soldiers’ National Cemetery itself was transferred to the federal government in 1872 and is now part of Gettysburg National Military Park. A monument, the Soldiers’ National Monument, stands near the spot where the speakers’ platform is believed to have been, although the exact location has been debated by historians.

Key people

• Abraham Lincoln: president of the United States, who gave the dedicatory remarks.
• Edward Everett: orator who delivered the two-hour main address.
• David Wills: Gettysburg lawyer who organised the cemetery and hosted Lincoln.
• John G. Nicolay and John Hay: Lincoln’s secretaries, who kept early copies and later wrote his biography.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Lincoln wrote it on the back of an envelope. He drafted it on official stationery and revised it carefully.
• Myth: the audience was unimpressed. Applause interrupted the speech several times according to some reports, and reactions depended largely on the listener’s politics.
• Myth: Lincoln was the main speaker. Everett gave the main oration; Lincoln was asked for brief dedicatory remarks.

Timeline

• 1863, 1-3 July: Battle of Gettysburg.
• 1863, 2 November: David Wills formally invites Lincoln to speak.
• 1863, 18 November: Lincoln travels by train to Gettysburg.
• 1863, 19 November: The cemetery is dedicated; Everett and Lincoln speak.
• 1863, 20 November: Everett writes to Lincoln praising the speech.
• 1864: Lincoln writes the Everett, Bancroft and Bliss copies.
• 1922, 30 May: The Lincoln Memorial in Washington is dedicated, with the address carved on its south wall.

Why it matters

The Gettysburg Address gave the Union cause its most enduring statement: that the war was being fought for a nation dedicated to equality and for government by the people. Memorised by generations of schoolchildren and inscribed on the Lincoln Memorial, it is quoted around the world as a definition of democracy. Lincoln himself would be assassinated less than eighteen months later, in the events described in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.