Gettysburg Address

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS. The Gettysburg Address was a brief oration delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on 19 November 1863 during the dedication ceremony of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The entire speech consisted of 272 words and took approximately three minutes to deliver. Its simple eloquence and evocation of transcendent themes are recognized as one of, if not the greatest, speech in American politics. Demonstrating the quintessence of Lincoln's thought concerning the sacred nature of liberty embodied in the democratic experiment, the address is heralded with transforming Northern opinion about the "unfinished work" of war before them and ultimately revolutionizing how Americans understood the nature of the Republic.

"On a Great Battle-Field of That War"

Since the opening days of July 1863, life in the town of Gettysburg and the surrounding area had been utterly transformed. During three days of battle, more than 85,000 Federals and nearly 65,000 Confederates clashed over a twenty-five-square-mile area. By the close of 3 July 1863 the number of dead, wounded, and missing from this single battle was unparalleled at the time. Nor would this level of destruction to human life be matched during the remainder of the war. Losses among the North's Army of the Potomac are conservatively estimated at more than 3,100 killed and approximately 14,500 wounded—more

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than 2,000 of them mortally—with about 5,400 missing. Confederate casualties rates were higher. Of the 65,000 men under General Robert E. Lee's command, one-third were killed, wounded, or missing in battle. For the nearly 2,400 residents of Gettysburg, these staggering numbers proved to be nearly overwhelming. In the weeks and months that followed, the surrounding countryside served as a makeshift hospital and morgue for the region.

An estimated eight thousand human bodies, many buried with only a scant cover of earth, were scattered throughout the battlegrounds. While thousands of rotting animal carcasses were set ablaze to help alleviate potential health risks, in late August patients at the temporary hospital in the Lutheran Seminary still complained of illnesses caused by improperly buried human remains. The often-grisly task of reinterring human remains would continue through the following spring, with nearly one thousand bodies remaining unidentified.

Amid this destruction Lincoln and his two young secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, stepped off the train from Washington, D. C., to prepare for the commemoration ceremonies the following day. It is hard to imagine that the president could have envisioned that his planned remarks would elicit such purpose and meaning out of the devastation witnessed around him, but Lincoln was somehow up to the task. As one scholar has observed, the transformative power of the English language has rarely achieved such heights.

"Far Above Our Poor Power to Add or Detract"

Although through time we have come to identify Lincoln's remarks as "the" Gettysburg Address, in actuality the president was but one of five scheduled speakers to address the crowd that clear November afternoon. Such a designation would have come as a surprise to the ceremony organizers, who conceived of Lincoln's "dedicatory remarks," as they were listed in the program, as secondary to those of the day's main speaker, Edward Everett. An American statesman and scholar, Everett graduated from Harvard College in 1811 and returned to the school in 1819 as a professor of Greek. He quickly established himself as a scholar, becoming editor of the North American Review in 1820. Four years later he was elected a member of the U. S. House of Representatives. Following a decad in the House, Everett was elected governor of Massachusetts. He briefly returned to academia as president of Harvard from 1846 to 1849. Everett returned to Washington as secretary of state in 1852. The following year he entered the U. S. Senate. As one who had been schooled at the highest levels of public oratory for years, Everett—a man praised by former students such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and one of the nation's most popular orators—seemed to be a natural selection for such an important occasion. In addition to Lincoln, those scheduled to join Everett at the podium were the Reverend T. H. Stockton, who would give the opening prayer; B. B. French, who composed a hymn for the occasion; and the Reverend H. L. Baugher, who was to deliver the benediction.

Shortly after noon on 18 November 1863, Lincoln boarded the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from Washington. In Baltimore, the President's coach was switched to the North Central line, which made a brief stop in Hanover Junction, Pennsylvania. Arriving in Gettysburg at dusk, Lincoln was met by the principal organizers and participants of the dedication ceremonies. Coffins for the reinterrment of soldiers still lined the station platform when the president disembarked from the train. That evening the leader of the Union dined with Everett, who spoke of the somber scenes he had witnessed two days earlier on a tour of the battlefield. Later that evening the Fifth New York Artillery band serenaded the president and shortly thereafter, the commander in chief retired to his room to put the finishing touches on his speech. Late the following morning, Everett, Lincoln, and other dignitaries gathered on the small raised platform near the partially completed burial grounds. Tens of thousands of onlookers gathered that morning, many of them family members of the dead who had traveled long distances, waiting to hear words of consolation that would somehow make sense of the personal tragedies that had befallen them. Spoken among the poignant realities of war, Lincoln's remarks would soon transform this scene of despair and purposelessness into a symbol of national purpose and sacred cause.

"The World Will Little Note, Nor Long Remember What We Say Here"

Completing his speech, Lincoln purportedly returned to his seat suggesting to his bodyguard, Ward Lamon, that the remarks, like a bad plow, "won't scour." This myth, along with many others that emerged in the years following the address, suggest that Lincoln gave only scant time to prepare for his speech and subsequently was disappointed by its results. Lincoln's words, however, were not the result of his simply jotting down notes on the back of an envelope during his train ride from Washington to Pennsylvania; instead, the Gettysburg Address was the product of a gifted writer who over time had carefully crafted his message to give it a power and resonance that extended beyond the local residents, mourners, and curious spectators who gathered on that fall afternoon. With the exception of his contemporary partisan detractors, Lincoln's efforts were enormously successful on this account.

Historians have suggested that the president accomplished this objective by employing three principal literary techniques. The first was a compression of style. Lincoln's economy of the written word modeled itself after some of the great political orations of antiquity. This style, harkening to the past, appealed to Americans who were schooled in the classics. A second and related technique employed by Lincoln was a suppression of particulars. Despite what we assume to be the subjects of the Gettysburg Address, the speech never refers to Gettysburg or the battle in particular and it avoids any mention of the institution of slavery, the South, the Union, or the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, these issues are addressed indirectly by the speech with the theme of preservation of self-government at its center. Finally, Lincoln expressed ideas about the current crisis by using polarities. The juxtaposition of themes—for example, the acts of dedication among the living contrasted with those who have died—not only engaged the audience gathered at Gettysburg that day, but speak to the essential challenges facing succeeding generations of a nation "conceived in Liberty." In this sense the Gettysburg Address retains a timeless quality, a muse for all Americans to dedicate their lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McPherson, James M. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Neely, Mark E., Jr. The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Nevins, Alan. The War for the Union: The Organized War, 1863– 1864. New York: Scribner, 1971.

Peterson, Merrill D. Lincoln in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. This work remains the most thorough treatment of Lincoln's address. It is an outstanding study of the literary devices Lincoln employed to draft his speech as well as the historical context in which it was delivered.

Kent A. McConnell

See also Gettysburg, Battle of ; Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address ; Oratory ; and vol. 9: Gettysburg Address .