The Gettysburg Address

Overview

The Gettysburg Address is one page and takes two minutes to deliver. Lincoln gave it on 19 November 1863 at the dedication of a national cemetery on the battlefield where, four and a half months earlier, something like fifty thousand men had been killed, wounded or gone missing in three days.

He was not the main speaker. That was Edward Everett, former president of Harvard, former senator and secretary of state, and the most admired orator in the country, who spoke for two hours from memory. Lincoln was asked for a few appropriate remarks.

There is no single authoritative text. Five manuscripts in Lincoln’s hand survive, they differ in small ways, and the newspaper shorthand reports differ again. The version usually quoted is the Bliss copy, the last he wrote out and the only one he signed. The differences matter chiefly for the phrase under God, which appears in three of the five.

The story that he scribbled it on the back of an envelope on the train is false. He worked on it in Washington beforehand and revised afterwards.

The argument

The dating. Everything starts with the first eleven words. Four score and seven years before 1863 is 1776, which places the nation’s birth at the Declaration of Independence, not at the Constitution of 1787 and not at its ratification.

That is a contested claim and Lincoln knew it. The Constitution was the legal foundation of the United States, it had protected slavery in several clauses, and the Southern case rested on it. The Declaration had no legal force and asserted that all men are created equal. By dating the country from the second document, Lincoln makes equality the founding proposition and the Constitution a later instrument that has to be measured against it.

He had been making this argument for years, against Stephen Douglas and against the Dred Scott decision. What is new here is that he does not argue it. He states it as a date and moves on, and the audience accepts it as a fact about the calendar.

The test. The war is then redescribed. It is not a rebellion to be put down or a contest over territory; it is a test of whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. That framing makes the stakes universal. Self-government itself is on trial, and the question is being asked of the world.

The refusal. The middle passage does the opposite of what a dedication speech does. We cannot dedicate, cannot consecrate, cannot hallow this ground; the men who struggled here have already done it, beyond anything the living can add or detract. Lincoln declines the ceremonial function he was given, and by declining it transfers the obligation onto the audience.

The turn. The last third is the argument. It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work, to take increased devotion from the dead, to resolve that they shall not have died in vain. The structure is a piece of rhetorical engineering: the dead have given their lives and can do no more, the living can, and the only way to honour the transaction is to finish the thing.

Then the new birth of freedom. The phrase does real work. Lincoln is not asking for a restoration of what was; he is saying the country will come out of this as something different, which by November 1863 meant a country without slavery, ten months after the Emancipation Proclamation.

And the closing clause, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. The formulation was not new. Wycliffe’s Bible preface, Daniel Webster and the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker all have versions, and Lincoln’s law partner Herndon says Lincoln had read Parker. What is Lincoln’s is the placement: three prepositions at the end of a two-minute speech, arranged so that the last word of the last sentence is a promise about survival.

The style. The speech is almost entirely Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. It uses no proper nouns at all: no Gettysburg, no Union, no Confederacy, no slavery, no Lee, no Meade. It is built on triads, of the people, by the people, for the people, and dedicate, consecrate, hallow, and on repetitions that accumulate rather than decorate. Nothing in it is specific to the occasion, which is why it survived the occasion.

How to read it

Read it aloud, twice, and time yourself. Understanding that this is two minutes long is part of understanding what it does.

Then read Everett’s two-hour oration, or the opening pages of it. It is competent, learned, full of classical parallels and specific detail about the battle, and completely dead. Everett wrote to Lincoln the next day saying he would be glad if he had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln did in two minutes.

Count the proper nouns and notice there are none. Then ask what a speech about a battle achieves by refusing to name anything in it.

Read the Declaration of Independence immediately afterwards and look for the sentence Lincoln is quoting without quotation marks.

Read Garry Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg if the argument interests you. His thesis, that Lincoln used the occasion to change what the country was founded on, is contested and it is the most illuminating thing written about the speech.

And read it against Douglass’ Fourth of July address from eleven years earlier, which uses the same founding document to opposite rhetorical effect: Douglass says the promise is not yours to celebrate while you hold slaves, Lincoln says the promise is what the dead were dying to make good.

Questions it raises

• Is dating the nation from 1776 a historical claim, a legal one, or a rhetorical act? Does it matter which?
• The speech never mentions slavery. Is that evasion, tact, or the reason it lasted?
• Lincoln says the world will not remember what is said here. Why is that the only thing in the speech that turned out wrong?
• A new birth of freedom implies the old birth was defective. How much of the founding is Lincoln conceding was wrong?
• Government of the people, by the people, for the people was not his phrase. Does originality matter in oratory?
• Two minutes replaced two hours in the national memory. What made the short one survive, and can that be generalised?