On the morning of November 19, 1863, approximately 15,000 people descended upon Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to officially dedicate its National Cemetery. Less than five months earlier, Gettysburg’s farms transformed into fields of blood as one of the largest battles ever staged on the vast continent erupted on the hamlet’s doorstep. The bodies of Union soldiers that carpeted the pastures after three days of carnage at the Battle of Gettysburg now rested in freshly dug graves beneath the blue autumn sky.
The cemetery’s dedication ceremony had been delayed by a month out of deference to the schedule of the keynote speaker—celebrated orator Edward Everett. While the former statesman, diplomat and university president requested the occasion be postponed to provide more time to craft his speech, President Abraham Lincoln accepted an invitation from event organizer David Wills to share “a few appropriate remarks.” With his oration intended to be a footnote to Everett’s address, Lincoln fulfilled his assignment to keep his words sparse. His Gettysburg Address lasted less than two minutes.
The world little noted nor long remembered Everett’s two-hour oration—except for its verbosity. By contrast, the 10-sentence speech delivered by Lincoln became perhaps the most famous in American history.
Gettysburg Address Enters the National Memory
The historical significance of the Gettysburg Address could not have been divined from the sprinkle of applause that greeted its conclusion. “Anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce,” wrote the American correspondent for the Times of London.
In a divided America, Lincoln’s call for a “new birth of freedom” initially resonated only with his fellow Republicans. “The Gettysburg Address was received for the most part as a partisan speech,” says Martin Johnson, an associate professor of history at Miami University and author of Writing the Gettysburg Address. “For the first 30 or so years after the war, it was really seen as a Radical Republican speech.” Following the Civil War, Union veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic kept the memory of the oration alive by organizing Memorial Day commemorations at which the Gettysburg Address was often recited.
The Gettysburg Address did not enter the broader American canon until decades after Lincoln’s death—following World War I and the 1922 opening of the Lincoln Memorial, where the speech is etched in marble. As the Gettysburg Address gained in popularity, it became a staple of school textbooks and readers, and the succinctness of the three-paragraph oration permitted it to be memorized by generations of American schoolchildren.
Beyond its brevity, the poetry of the Gettysburg Address is key to its historical longevity. “There are plenty of short speeches, but it’s the beauty of the address and the phrases that stick in the mind that make it enduring,” Johnson says. Lincoln eschewed the flowery Victorian flourishes favored by Everett and other speakers of the time for language as plain as the log cabin in which he was born. Although built with monosyllabic words, the composition nonetheless soars with its rhythm, biblical allusions and memorable phrases—right from its opening of “four score and seven years ago.”
Lincoln Links Gettysburg to 1776
The power of the Gettysburg Address also comes from its linkage of the sacrifice of the dead Union soldiers—and those who would fall in subsequent battles—to the promise of the United States espoused in the Declaration of Independence.
Lincoln devoted the speech’s opening paragraph to the revolutionary “fathers” who birthed “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In the following paragraph, he connected them to the fallen soldiers who “gave their lives that that nation might live” before binding them to “the living” in the third paragraph.
“Lincoln linked past, present and future in a powerful story that could mobilize and unify Americans around a radical Unionist vision of America that sought to assure that democracy and human rights would survive and triumph,” Johnson says.
While the Declaration of Independence was dedicated to the ideal of equality, that could never be the reality in a country that condoned slavery. The Gettysburg Address reflected Lincoln’s recent evolution that the Civil War was no longer just a fight to preserve the Union, but a battle for the survival of democracy and full abolition of slavery. The Great Emancipator called on Americans to dedicate themselves so that the United States “shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
A Timeless Call to Action
While Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address for the exact political moment in November 1863, the speech makes no explicit mention of “Gettysburg,” “slavery” or “the Union.” The lofty language wielded by the 16th president lends it a timeless quality that has spoken to subsequent generations of Americans confronting their own challenges.
“During World War I, World War II, the Cold War and the fight for Civil Rights—when Americans were facing really tough odds and perhaps struggling for the survival of the nation—the Gettysburg Address was one of the go-to texts to explain what the fight was all about,” Johnson says. “It’s an aspirational vision of the American project that we can always embrace.”
Much as Lincoln in 1863 challenged the living to ensure the sacrifice of the fallen Union soldiers was not “in vain,” the Gettysburg Address continues to stand as a call to action. “We’re always going to face difficulties, and we’re always going to be turning to liberty, equality, and democracy to carry us through,” Johnson says. “That message will always be perennial and pertinent because we’re always exploring and expanding the nature of the American experiment.”
