On July 1 through July 3, 1863, at the Battle of Gettysburg, Pa., Americans slew Americans in the most lethal battle ever fought on United States soil. In that most pivotal clash of the Civil War, more than 51,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or reported missing.
Four and a half months later, on Nov. 19, 1863, a crowd of about 15,000 gathered at Gettysburg to consecrate a new Civil War cemetery. Most of us are unaware that the real Gettysburg Address was delivered that day by the featured speaker on the program, Edward Everett, former president of Harvard and the nation’s most celebrated orator.
The speech that Abraham Lincoln spoke that Thursday afternoon was listed as “Dedicatory Remarks by the President of the United States.” Those remarks were intended as a brief follow-up to Everett’s two-hour oration dedicating the opening of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg.
What happened at Gettysburg was that with 272 fateful words and but 10 sentences, Abraham Lincoln forged “a new birth of freedom” out of blood and shock. Within the brief compass of less than three minutes, a weary president gave a young nation a voice to sing of itself.
Afterward, Everett took Lincoln aside and said, “My speech will soon be forgotten; yours never will. How gladly would I exchange my hundred pages for your twenty lines!”
The Gettysburg Address is the most memorized speech in the world. The very brevity of Lincoln’s text rendered it more luminous, more universal and more memorable. That compactness allowed hundreds of newspapers to print the entire text and countless schoolchildren yet unborn to memorize it.
The IRS Form 1040 EZ contains 418 words and the back of a Lay’s Potato Chips bag 401. With just 272 words, Lincoln transformed a gruesome battle into the raison d’être of a truly United States that for the first time in its history became a union. Before Lincoln, people used “the United States” as a plural: “The United States are …” Ever after it would be “The United States is …”
Abraham Lincoln articulated not only a creed of democracy, but also, in the words of Carl Sandburg, “the great American poem.”
Lincoln said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” In that he was mistaken. The world at once noted what he said there and has never ceased remembering.
Here is the text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, 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.