The Gettysburg Address

Summary

On 19 November 1863, four and a half months after the Union victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a large crowd gathered to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery, where Union soldiers killed in the fighting of 1-3 July were being reinterred. The principal orator was Edward Everett, the former secretary of state and president of Harvard, who spoke for about two hours. David Wills, the local attorney who organized the cemetery, had asked President Lincoln to offer a few appropriate remarks as the formal act of dedication. Lincoln spoke for roughly two minutes, about 270 words. The address moves through time in three steps. It begins in the past, eighty-seven years earlier, when the fathers founded a nation on the proposition that all men are created equal; Lincoln dates the nation from the Declaration of Independence of 1776. It turns to the present: a civil war is testing whether any nation so founded can long endure, and the crowd has come to set aside part of the field for those who died that the nation might live. Then Lincoln reverses his own premise. The living cannot truly dedicate, consecrate, or hallow the ground, because the men who struggled there have already done it; the world will forget the words spoken that day but never the deeds. What remains for the living is to be dedicated to the unfinished work. The last sentence, long and cumulative, binds the hearers to a resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that the nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of, by, and for the people shall not perish. The speech names no battle, general, state, or enemy, and it speaks of the war's purpose in terms broad enough to cover the whole nation. Its cadences echo the King James Bible. Newspaper reactions divided largely along party lines, but Everett wrote to Lincoln the next day that he wished he had come as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln had in two minutes. Five manuscript copies in Lincoln's hand survive, differing slightly in wording; the address is carved on the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial.

Top Lessons

• Honoring the dead by finishing their work

  Lincoln refuses to let a cemetery dedication remain a ceremony. He argues that the soldiers' sacrifice cannot be improved by words, so the only fitting tribute is for the living to take up the task the dead advanced. Remembrance, in this speech, is a form of obligation.

• The founding as a proposition to be proved

  By dating the nation from 1776 and calling equality a proposition, Lincoln treats the Declaration of Independence as the nation's defining creed and the war as its proof. The speech teaches that a people founded on an idea must keep showing that the idea can endure.

• The power of brevity

  Everett's learned two-hour oration was admired and then largely forgotten; Lincoln's ten sentences became the best-known speech in American history. Lincoln compresses past, present, and future into a single movement and lets plain words such as here, dedicate, and devotion carry the weight through repetition.

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