Abraham Lincoln.

Gettysburg
Address. 1863

This is an oral speech that Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States,
delivered during the American Civil War, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19,
1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania;
four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the
Battle of Gettysburg.
It isn't an impromptu speech but carefully crafted as a secondary to Edward Everett's
one (Wills),1 who was a renowned diplomat and academic regarded as the greatest
orator of his time. The fact that Lincoln counted with the best speaker of the time shows
that he was aware of the importance of the moment. What he didn't suspect is that his
brief speech would become regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American
history. While the address contains a political aim mainly that of preserving the Union,
it served as a stirring and moving speech that could metaphorically speak for all the
dead soldiers in the war.
According to William E. (Bartelt) 2 Abraham Lincoln was a descendant of Samuel
Lincoln, who migrated from Norfolk, England to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638. He
was the President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination
in April 1865 and his priority was to keep America as one country.
In his first inaugural address, 4 March 1861, the President ended it with an appeal to the
people of the South: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies ... The
mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every
living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the
Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
(Belz)3. This climate of harmony would be reflected later in Gettysburg Address.

1 Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America.

Simon and Schuster, 1992.
2 Bartelt, William E. There I Grew Up: Remembering Abraham Lincoln's
Indiana Youth. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008.
3 Belz, Herman. "Lincoln, Abraham". American Conservatism: An
Encyclopedia. ISI Books, 2006.
2

When the President entered into war with the Confederacy, his aim, then, was not to
disrupt the system of slavery in the South, but rather to repair the fractured nation. Still,
in the early years of his presidency, as Lincoln worked toward reconciliation, he was
also forced to contend with the question of how best to deal with the issue of slavery
and, more broadly, with the expanding black population in the Union.
The American Civil War was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 to determine the
survival of the Union or independence for the Confederacy. So the Battle of Gettysburg
(Sauers)4 in 1863 was just in the middle of that civil war. Three days of fighting at
Gettysburg took a horrible toll on both sides, 10,000 soldiers killed or mortally
wounded, 30,000 injured, and 10,000 captured or missing.
After the battle, bodies lay scattered throughout Gettysburgs farmlands. Burial work
commenced quickly as fears of epidemic rose. The dead were hastily buried in shallow
graves on the battlefield, crudely identified by pencil writing on wooden boards. Rain
and wind began eroding the impromptu graves, and Gettysburgs citizens called for the
creation of a soldiers cemetery for the proper burial of the Union dead.
With the support of the Pennsylvania Governor, a committee formed to select an
appropriate site for the cemetery and oversee the interment of Union remains. The site
chosen encompassed the hill from which the Union center repulsed Picketts Charge.
State-appropriated funds purchased the property, and the reburial process began four
months after the battle on October 27, 1863.
A few weeks after the burial process started, a dedication ceremony was held at the yet
to be completed Soldiers' National Cemetery. The cemetery committee chose
Massachusetts statesman and orator Edward Everett to deliver the main speech. The
committee asked President Abraham Lincoln to deliver a few appropriate remarks. At
the November 19 ceremony, Everett spoke for two hours on the causes of war and the
events that led to the Battle of Gettysburg. After his remarks, Lincoln rose and spoke
for two minutes. What made the speech immediately notable was its brevity (10
sentences and 271 words) Lincoln spoke for fewer than three minutes.

4 Sauers, Richard A. Battle of Gettysburg, Encyclopedia of the American Civil

War: A Political, Social, and Military History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
3

According to (Graham)5, the Gettysburg Address could qualify as a slam poem. The
address is filled with poetic and rhetorical constructs so that it is more of a poem than a
political speech. Poetically, the cadence began with two rhyming words: "four score."
The line also contains a rhythm of alliteration, "fathers forth" and "new nation."
"Four score and seven" was not a simple way to say 87. Lincoln was asking his
audience to calculate backward to discover that the nations starting point was not the
Constitution in 1787, nor the election of George Washington in 1789 as the first
president, but the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which was
considered a sacred document to both the Unionists of the North and Secessionists of
the South.
Notably, the voice in the Gettysburg Address is not a first-person singular individual.
The address is full of first-person references, but everyone is plural. Ten times Lincoln
uses the plural we, and three times us. The speaker is, in effect, Americans and
Unionists, not the president.
Lincoln built the Gettysburg Address upon a structure of past, present, and future. He
started in the past by placing the battlefield at Gettysburg and the "insignificance" of the
dedication in the context of American history. In speaking of "our fathers, " Lincoln
invoked the common heritage of the Founding Fathers for both Northerners and
Southerners.
His self-education led him to read, surely, classic books like Peloponnesian War
because, according to (Wills)6 there are parallels between Lincoln's speech and
Pericles's Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War as described by (Thucydides)7 .
But while Everett's Oration was explicitly neoclassical, referring directly to Marathon
5 Graham, Christopher Fox.
http://foxthepoet.blogspot.com.es/2008/09/poetical-analysis-of-abrahamlincolns.html. s.f. 08 de 03 de 2015.
6 Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America.
Simon and Schuster, 1992.
7 Thucydides. "Pericles' Funeral Oration from Thucydides: Peloponnesian
War". Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics. The Constitution Society.,
2007.
4

and Pericles, Lincoln's rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical, according to

(Gopnik)8 .
Such that the most famous sentence in this speech "that government of the people, by
the people, for the people" is directly extracted from the Prologue to John Wycliffe's
first English translation of the Bible (Hannan)9 , which first appeared in 1384, that said:
"This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people. "
As Lincoln spoke about the dimensions of the past, he constructed the content of his
political purposes by repeating key words: "great civil war," "great battlefield, " "so
dedicated, " and "come to dedicate. " Lincolns use of repetition allowed him to
underscore his rhetorical purpose.
In the last three sentences of the address, Lincoln shifted the focus a final time. In the
architecture of his address, Lincoln had recalled the past and what the nation did at its
beginning, recited what the soldiers did in the near present, and now prepared to open
out the future and speak to the responsibility of the listeners.
In the immediate aftermath of the speech, Lincoln was uncertain about how it was
received. He reportedly turned to another person on the platform and commented, in
effect, that the speech fell on its face. Journalists were mixed, some complaining the
speech was too short, so short they had thought the address was only an opening remark
before a larger and more political speech. Other journalists commented on its poetry,
eloquence and brilliance. The address has become one of the best known, most repeated,
and beloved speeches in American history, so the latter group eventually won out.
As proof, Everett, the great orator, wrote a note to Lincoln the next day: "I should be
glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two
hours, as you did in two minutes." (Frothingham)10
8 Gopnik, Adam. "Angels and Ages: Lincoln's language and its legacy".
The New Yorker 28 de May de 2007: 30-31.
9 Hannan, Dan. "150 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln praised
'government of the people, by the people, for the people' but the words
were not his". Wycliffe, John. 2011.
10 Frothingham, Paul Revere. Edward Everett, Orator and Statesman.
Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925.
5

The war served as a brutal purification, an inevitable struggle to rectify the major error
made by the Founding Fathers: in a nation where all men are created equal, how can one
man be another mans slave?
For 87 years, slavery divided the nation politically until the civil war divided it
militarily. The war purged the nation of this crime, allowing it to be reborn at
Gettysburg.
Through the address, Lincoln created the idea of a unified nation in which states' rights
were subject to the rights of the nation as a whole. The issue of states' rights valued over
national common good had were a determent to military capacity in the war. After the
war ended, the idea of national unity expressed in the address also contributed to a
dramatic shift from provincial to national political identity. Before the American Civil
War and the Gettysburg Address, each state considered itself a state inside United States
of America, but afterward they were The United States of America.

Bibliography
Bartelt, William E. There I Grew Up: Remembering Abraham Lincoln's
Indiana Youth. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008.
Belz, Herman. "Lincoln, Abraham". American Conservatism: An
Encyclopedia. ISI Books, 2006.
Frothingham, Paul Revere. Edward Everett, Orator and Statesman. Boston.
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925.
Gopnik, Adam. "Angels and Ages: Lincoln's language and its legacy". The
New Yorker 28 de May de 2007: 30-31.
Graham, Christopher Fox.
http://foxthepoet.blogspot.com.es/2008/09/poetical-analysis-ofabraham-lincolns.html. s.f. 08 de 03 de 2015.
Hannan, Dan. "150 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln praised 'government
of the people, by the people, for the people' but the words were not
his". Wycliffe, John. 2011.

Sauers, Richard A. Battle of Gettysburg, Encyclopedia of the American Civil

War: A Political, Social, and Military History. W. W. Norton & Company,
2000.
Thucydides. "Pericles' Funeral Oration from Thucydides: Peloponnesian
War". Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics. The Constitution
Society., 2007.
Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. Simon
and Schuster, 1992.