Gettysburg Address

Gettysburg Address (1863).Union soldiers who died in the three fierce days of battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (1–3 July 1863), were buried in a cemetery specially created by a corporation of northern states. The leading orator of the day, Edward Everett of Massachusetts, was asked to deliver the funeral oration at the cemetery's formal opening on 19 November 1863. President Abraham Lincoln, invited to make “remarks” on the same occasion, quickly accepted, since presidents had few occasions to deliver speeches at a time when the State of the Union address was sent to Congress in written form. Lincoln knew the power of his oratory and prepared very carefully all his formal statements as president. The myth that he scribbled his remarks on an envelope reflected a romantic ideal of “natural” inspiration, contrasting Lincoln's short (three‐minute) speech with Everett's labored two‐hour performance. In what became known as the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln distilled into 272 words a use of the Declaration of Independence he had developed over the preceding six years—putting the clause “all men are created equal” at the center of American government. This prompted some protest in the North that Lincoln was enforcing a nonlegislative document, the Declaration, instead of the binding Constitution. But Lincoln viewed the Constitution as a partial and developing document meant to put the ideals of the Declaration into practice.

The need for brevity made Lincoln pack a great deal into few words. His argument for union is contained in the triple invocation of “the people” in the last sentence—he and others had opposed secession on the grounds that “the people” as a whole had ratified the Constitution and only they, acting as a whole, could amend or dissolve the union formed by that document. He also drew on the idealistic, transcendental rhetoric associated with the rural-cemetery movement of the time.

Contrary to myth, both Everett's and Lincoln's speeches were successful with their original audience. Lincoln's was interrupted by applause five times and was widely reprinted. His assassination less than a year and a half following the address made it the most concentrated and memorable statement of his attitude toward the Civil War. It has become his legacy, one of the great informal charters of the nation, competing with and eventually displacing Washington's Farewell Address as a statement to rank with the Declaration and the Constitution as an expression of the spirit of American government.
See also Equality; Republicanism.

Bibliography

David C. Mearns and and Lloyd A. Dunlap , Long Remembered: Facsimiles of the Five Versions of the Gettysburg Address in the Handwriting of Abraham Lincoln, 1963.
Garry Wills , Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1992.

Garry Wills