Everything about The Gettysburg Address totally explained
The
Gettysburg Address is the most famous speech of
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and one of the most quoted speeches in
United States history. It was delivered at the dedication of the
Soldiers' National Cemetery in
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday,
November 19,
1863, during the
American Civil War, four and a half months after the
Union armies defeated those of the
Confederacy at the decisive
Battle of Gettysburg.
Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to other presentations that day, came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history. In just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the
Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the
Union, but as "a new birth of
freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, and that would also create a unified nation in which
states' rights were no longer dominant.
Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four
score and seven years ago...", Lincoln referred to the events of the
Civil War and described the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to dedicate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to consecrate the living in the struggle to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shan't perish from the earth".
Despite the speech's prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, the exact wording of the speech is disputed. The five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address differ in a number of details and also differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech.
Background
From July 1–3, 1863, more than 160,000 American soldiers clashed in the
Battle of Gettysburg, in what would prove to be both a turning point of the Civil War and one of its bloodiest battles. The battle also had a major impact on the town of
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which numbered only 2,400 inhabitants. The battlefield contained the bodies of more than 7,500 dead soldiers and several thousand horses of the Union's
Army of the Potomac and the
Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia, and the stench of rotting bodies in the humid July air was overpowering.
Interring the dead in a dignified and orderly manner became a high priority for the few thousand residents of Gettysburg. Initially, the town planned to buy land for a cemetery and then ask the families of the dead to pay for their burial. However,
David Wills, a wealthy 32-year-old attorney, objected to this idea and wrote to the Governor of Pennsylvania,
Andrew Gregg Curtin, suggesting instead a National Cemetery to be funded by the states. Wills was authorized to purchase 17 acres (69,000 m²) for a cemetery to honor those lost in the summer's battle, paying $2,475.87 for the land.
Wills originally planned to dedicate this new cemetery on Wednesday,
October 23, and invited
Edward Everett, who had served as
Secretary of State,
U.S. Senator,
U.S. Representative,
Governor of Massachusetts, president of
Harvard University, and
Vice Presidential candidate, to be the main speaker. At that time, Everett was a widely famed orator. In reply, Everett told Wills and his organizing committee that he'd be unable to prepare an appropriate speech in such a short period of time, and requested that the date be postponed. The committee agreed, and the dedication was postponed until Thursday,
November 19.
Almost as an afterthought, Wills and the event committee invited President Lincoln to participate in the ceremony. Wills's letter stated, "It is the desire that, after the Oration, you, as
Chief Executive of the nation, formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks." Lincoln received formal notice of his invitation to participate only seventeen days before the ceremony, while Everett had been invited 40 days earlier: "Although there's some evidence Lincoln expected Wills's letter, its late date makes the author appear presumptuous...Seventeen days was extraordinarily short notice for presidential participation even by nineteenth-century standards." Furthermore, Wills's letter "made it equally clear to the president that he'd have only a small part in the ceremonies", Contrary to popular belief, Lincoln neither completed his address while on the train nor wrote it on the back of an envelope. This story is at odds with the existence of several early drafts on Executive Mansion stationery as well as the reports of Lincoln's final editing while a guest of David Wills in Gettysburg. On the morning of November 19 at 9:30 a.m., Lincoln, astride a chestnut bay horse and riding between Secretary of State
William H. Seward and
Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, joined in a procession with the assembled dignitaries, townspeople, and widows marching out to the grounds to be dedicated.
Approximately 15,000 people are estimated to have attended the ceremony, including the sitting governors of six of the 24 Union states:
Andrew Gregg Curtin of Pennsylvania,
Augustus Bradford of Maryland,
Oliver P. Morton of Indiana,
Horatio Seymour of New York,
Joel Parker of New Jersey, and
David Tod of Ohio.
Canadian politician
William McDougall also attended as Lincoln's guest. The precise location of the program within the grounds of the cemetery is disputed. Reinterment of the bodies buried from field graves into the cemetery, which had begun within months of the battle, was less than half complete on the day of the ceremony.
Political significance
By August 1863 the casualty lists from Civil War battles included a quarter of a million names. As a result, anti-war and anti-Lincoln sentiments rose in the north. Peace Democrats known as
Copperheads were eager to oust Lincoln in the 1864 election in order to end the war through concessions to the Confederacy.
Additionally, as the Union Army decreased in numbers due to death, more soldiers were needed to replace the ranks. Lincoln's 1863 drafts were considered "odious" among many in the north, particularly immigrants. The
New York Draft Riots of July, 1863 were the most notable manifestation of this discontent.
Writing to Lincoln in September 1863, the Pennsylvania governor,
Andrew Curtin, warned that political sentiments were turning against Lincoln and the war effort.:
If the election were to occur now, the result would be extremely doubtful, and although most of our discreet friends are sanguine of the result, my impression is, the chances would be against us. The draft is very odious in the State... the Democratic leaders have succeeded in exciting prejudice and passion, and have infused their poison into the minds of the people to a very large extent, and the changes are against us
By November 1863, Lincoln was quite sensible of the fact that he desperately needed to do or say something that would revive the Union's spirits toward the war effort. Operating in an era without TV, radio, or internet, Lincoln would have to get his message out via the press. His presence at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery would certainly draw reporters from around the country, and by means of their reports, Lincoln could speak to the nation. Hence, his decision to go to Gettysburg and urge the Union to "highly resolve" that the dead there "shall not have died in vain" was Lincoln's way of saying that if the "
Copperhead" peace Democrats get their way, then the men who there gave the "last full measure of devotion" would have done so for no reason at all. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln was proposing this question: what would these men who died for this cause want us to do--quit now or finish the job? How the country answered this question would determine the 1864 election.
The political power of Lincoln's rhetoric was undeniable. Even a Copperhead with the misfortune of
Mrs. Bixby would be moved by Lincoln's call to "be here dedicated to the unfinished work" that men like her sons had thus far so nobly advanced. Perhaps the most important political consequence of the power of the Gettysburg Address is that Lincoln indeed won the election in 1864, thus assuring that the war would continue until the victory had been achieved.
Program and Everett's "Gettysburg Oration"
The program organized for that day by Wills and his committee included:
» Music, by Birgfield's Band
Prayer, by Reverend T.H. Stockton, D.D.
» Music, by the Marine Band
Oration, by Hon. Edward Everett
» Music, Hymn composed by B.B. French, Esq.
Dedicatory Remarks, by the President of the United States
» Dirge, sung by Choir selected for the occasion
Benediction, by Reverend H.L. Baugher, D.D.
And ended two hours later with:
» But they, I'm sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr-heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, and down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates the Battles of Gettysburg.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Not long after those well-received remarks, Lincoln spoke in his high-pitched
Kentucky accent for two or three minutes. Lincoln's "few appropriate remarks" summarized the war in 10 sentences and 272 words.
Despite the historical significance of Lincoln's speech, modern scholars disagree as to its exact wording, and contemporary transcriptions published in newspaper accounts of the event and even handwritten copies by Lincoln himself differ in their wording, punctuation, and structure. Of these versions, the Bliss version, written well after the speech as a favor for a friend, is viewed by many as the standard text. Its text differs, however, from the written versions prepared by Lincoln before and after his speech. It is the only version to which Lincoln affixed his signature, and the last he's known to have written.]]In a review of
Garry Wills's book,
Lincoln at Gettysburg, Civil War scholar
James McPherson notes the parallels between Lincoln's speech and
Pericles's Funeral Oration during the
Peloponnesian War as described by
Thucydides. In contrast, writer
Adam Gopnik, in
The New Yorker, notes that while Everett's Oration was explicitly
neoclassical, referring directly to
Marathon and
Pericles, "Lincoln’s rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in all of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the
King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of
Genesis." in
The American Monthly Review of Reviews, Albert Shaw credits a correspondent with pointing out the writings of
William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, who wrote in the 1888 work
Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of A Great Life that he'd brought to Lincoln some of the sermons of
abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, of
Massachusetts, and that Lincoln was moved by Parker's use of this idea:
Senator
Daniel Webster, the
"Second Reply to Hayne", in which Webster famously thundered "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" Specifically, in this
January 26,
1830 speech before the United States Senate, Webster described the Federal Government as: "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people," foreshadowing Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Webster also noted, "This government, Sir, is the independent offspring of the popular will. It isn't the creature of State legislatures; nay, more, if the whole truth must be told, the people brought it into existence, established it, and have hitherto supported it, for the very purpose, amongst others, of imposing certain salutary restraints on State sovereignties." Others, including
Allen C. Guelzo, the director of Civil War Era studies at
Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, suggested that Lincoln's formulation "four score and seven" was an allusion to the King James Version of the Bible's, in which man's lifespan is given as "threescore years and ten".
Five manuscripts
The five known manuscript copies of the Gettysburg Address are each named for the associated person who received it from Lincoln. Lincoln gave a copy to each of his private secretaries,
John Nicolay and
John Hay. In part because Lincoln provided a title and signed and dated the Bliss Copy, it has become the standard text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
The two earliest drafts of the Address are associated with some confusion and controversy regarding their existence and provenance. Nicolay and Hay were appointed custodians of Lincoln's papers by Lincoln's son
Robert Todd Lincoln in 1874.
Nicolay Copy
The Nicolay Copy is often called the "first draft" because it's believed to be the earliest copy that exists. Scholars disagree over whether the Nicolay Copy was actually the reading copy Lincoln held at Gettysburg on
November 19. In an 1894 article that included a facsimile of this copy, Nicolay, who had become the custodian of Lincoln's papers, wrote that Lincoln had brought to Gettysburg the first part of the speech written in ink on
Executive Mansion stationery, and that he'd written the second page in pencil on lined paper before the dedication on
November 19. The words "under God", for example, are missing in this copy from the phrase "that this nation (under God) shall have a new birth of freedom..." In order for the Nicolay draft to have been the reading copy, either the contemporary transcriptions were inaccurate, or Lincoln would have had to depart from his written text in several instances. This copy of the Gettysburg Address apparently remained in John Nicolay's possession until his death in 1901, when it passed to his friend and colleague John Hay.
Hay Copy
The existence of the Hay Copy was first announced to the public in 1906, after the search for the "original manuscript" of the Address among the papers of John Hay brought it to light. Lincoln eventually gave this copy to his other personal secretary,
John Hay, whose descendants donated both it and the Nicolay Copy to the Library of Congress in 1916.
Everett Copy
The Everett Copy, also known as the "Everett-Keyes Copy," was sent by President Lincoln to
Edward Everett in early 1864, at Everett's request. Everett was collecting the speeches at the Gettysburg dedication into one bound volume to sell for the benefit of stricken soldiers at New York's
Sanitary Commission Fair. The draft Lincoln sent became the third autograph copy, and is now in the possession of the Illinois State Historical Library in
Springfield, Illinois, Bancroft planned to include this copy in
Autograph Leaves of Our Country's Authors, which he planned to sell at a Soldiers' and Sailors' Sanitary Fair in
Baltimore. As this fourth copy was written on both sides of the paper, it proved unusable for this purpose, and Bancroft was allowed to keep it. This manuscript is the only one accompanied both by a letter from Lincoln transmitting the manuscript and by the original envelope addressed and
franked by Lincoln. This copy remained in the Bancroft family for many years, was sold to various dealers and purchased by Nicholas and Marguerite Lilly Noyes, who donated the manuscript to Cornell in 1949. It is now held by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Carl A. Kroch Library at
Cornell University.
Bliss Copy
Discovering that his fourth written copy couldn't be used, Lincoln then wrote a fifth draft, which was accepted for the purpose requested. The Bliss Copy, named for Colonel
Alexander Bliss, Bancroft's stepson and publisher of
Autograph Leaves, is the only draft to which Lincoln affixed his signature. Lincoln isn't known to have made any further copies of the Gettysburg Address. Because of the apparent care in its preparation, and in part because Lincoln provided a title and signed and dated this copy, it has become the standard version of the address and the source for most facsimile reproductions of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Cintas' properties were claimed by the
Castro government after the
Cuban Revolution in 1959, but Cintas, who died in 1957, willed the Gettysburg Address to the American people, provided it would be kept at the White House, where it was transferred in 1959.
Garry Wills concluded the Bliss Copy "is stylistically preferable to others in one significant way: Lincoln removed 'here' from 'that cause for which they (here) gave...' The seventh 'here' is in all other versions of the speech." Wills noted the fact that Lincoln "was still making such improvements," suggesting Lincoln was more concerned with a perfected text than with an 'original' one.
Contemporary sources and reaction
[[Image:Gettys.nyt.jpg|right|thumb|The
New York Times article from
November 20,
1863, indicates Lincoln's speech was interrupted five times by applause and was followed by "long continued applause."
Eyewitness reports vary as to their view of Lincoln's performance. In 1931, the printed recollections of 87-year-old Mrs. Sarah A. Cooke Myers, who at the age of 19 was present, suggest a dignified silence followed Lincoln's speech: "I was close to the President and heard all of the Address, but it seemed short. Then there was an impressive silence like our Menallen
Friends Meeting. There was no applause when he stopped speaking." According to historian
Shelby Foote, after Lincoln's presentation, the applause was delayed, scattered, and "barely polite." In contrast,
Pennsylvania Governor Curtin maintained, "He pronounced that speech in a voice that all the multitude heard. The crowd was hushed into silence because the President stood before them...It was so Impressive! It was the common remark of everybody. Such a speech, as they said it was!" Lincoln was glad to know the speech wasn't a "total failure". One year before his death in 1939, Rathvon's reminiscences were recorded on
February 12,
1938 at the Boston studios of radio station WRUL, including his reading the address, itself, and a 78 rpm record was pressed. The title of the 78 record was "I Heard Lincoln That Day - William R. Rathvon, TR Productions." A copy wound up at
National Public Radio (NPR) during a "Quest for Sound" project in 1999. NPR continues to air them around Lincoln's birthday.
Photographs
The only known and confirmed photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg, taken by photographer
David Bachrach was identified in the
Mathew Brady collection of photographic plates in the
National Archives and Records Administration in 1952. While Lincoln's speech was short and may have precluded multiple pictures of him while speaking, he and the other dignitaries sat for hours during the rest of the program. Given the length of Everett's speech and the length of time it took for 19th century photographers to get "set up" before taking a picture, it's quite plausible that the photographers were ill prepared for the brevity of Lincoln's remarks.
In 2006, Civil War enthusiast John Richter was credited with identifying two additional photographs in the Library of Congress collection that potentially show President Lincoln in the procession at Gettysburg.
Usage of "under God"
The words "under God" don't appear in the Nicolay and Hay drafts but are included in the three later copies (Everett, Bancroft, and Bliss). Accordingly, some
skeptics maintain that Lincoln didn't utter the words "under God" at Gettysburg. However, at least three reporters
telegraphed the text of Lincoln's speech on the day the Address was given with the words "under God" included:
"Every stenographic report, good, bad and indifferent, says 'that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom.' There was no common source from which all the reporters could have obtained those words but from Lincoln's own lips at the time of delivery. It won't do to say that [Secretary of War] Stanton suggested those words after Lincoln's return to Washington, for the words were telegraphed by at least three reporters on the afternoon of the delivery."
The reporters present included Joseph Gilbert, from the
Associated Press; Charles Hale, from the
Boston Advertiser;
John R. Young, from the
Philadelphia Press (and future
Librarian of Congress); and reporters from the
Cincinnati Commercial,
New York Tribune, and
New York Times. "He took down what he declared was the exact language of Lincoln's address, and his declaration was as good as the oath of a court stenographer. His associates confirmed his testimony, which was received, as it deserved to be at its face value."
Legacy
The importance of the Gettysburg Address in the history of the United States is underscored by its enduring presence in American culture. In addition to its prominent place carved into a stone
cella on the south wall of the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Gettysburg Address is frequently referred to in works of popular culture, with the implicit expectation that contemporary audiences will be familiar with Lincoln's words.
In the many generations that have passed since the Address, it has remained among the most famous speeches in American history. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is itself referenced in another of those famed orations,
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "
I Have a Dream" speech. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, King began with a reference to President Lincoln and his enduring words: "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice."
This fame is somewhat ironic, for Lincoln clearly states that he expects that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here."
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