Almost eight decades after the end of the Revolutionary War (1776-1783), there erupted another war (1861-1865). Mostly known today as the Civil War, the conflict seared our national consciousness and forever changed what it means to be an American.

At dawn of July 1, 1863, the war had been unfolding for more than two years. For the next three days in the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 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 November 19, 1863, a crowd of about 15,000 gathered at Gettysburg to consecrate a new Civil War cemetery. The story’s headline in The New York Times makes clear who was the designated declaimer of the day:

IMMENSE NUMBERS OF VISITORS
Oration By Hon. Edward Everett
Speeches of President Lincoln,
Mr. Seward and Governor Seymour 

Most of us are unaware that the nation’s most celebrated orator, Edward Everett of Massachusetts, delivered the main address that Thursday afternoon. The speech that Lincoln spoke was listed as “Dedicatory Remarks by the President of the United States.” Those remarks were intended as a brief and formal 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 271 fateful words in but 10 sentences, Abraham Lincoln forged “a new birth of freedom” out of the blood and shock of a sundered nation. Within the brief compass of less than three minutes, he gave that young nation a voice to sing of itself: 

“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 battle-field 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.”

Afterward, Edward 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 very brevity of Lincoln’s text rendered it more luminous, universal, and memorable. That compactness allowed hundreds of newspapers to print the text and countless schoolchildren to  memorize it. More than eight score years ago, on that brisk, sunny day in Pennsylvania, a weary president said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” In that, he was mistaken. The world noted and has never ceased remembering. Abraham Lincoln had forged not only a creed of democracy, but also, in the words of Carl Sandburg, “the great American poem.” 

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