What was the Gettysburg Address?
The Gettysburg Address is the short speech Abraham Lincoln gave on 19 November 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He spoke after the orator Edward Everett, who had talked for two hours. In 272 words Lincoln turned a cemetery dedication into a statement of what the Civil War was being fought for.1
In the first days of July 1863 the armies of the Union and the Confederacy fought the greatest battle of the Civil War around the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The story of those three days is told in our article on the Battle of Gettysburg. This is the story of what was said over its dead four months later.
A cemetery for the Union dead
The fighting left the dead in hasty graves across the fields, and four months later fewer than half had been reburied. The Union states that had lost men in the campaign paid for a proper cemetery, and the committee in charge was headed by David Wills, a Gettysburg attorney and Pennsylvania's state agent. By the middle of August Wills had bought 17 acres on Cemetery Hill, and the consecration was set for 19 November 1863.2
The main speaker was to be Edward Everett, a celebrated orator who had served as a senator and secretary of state. Lincoln's part was meant to be a secondary one. On 2 November, only 17 days before the ceremony, Wills wrote to invite the president to deliver a few appropriate remarks after the oration. The National Park Service suggests that this wording may hold the key to the brevity of what Lincoln said.3
The night at the Wills house
Lincoln and his party arrived by train at dusk on 18 November and went to the Wills house. There, the Park Service relates, he finished the speech. The popular story that he scribbled it on the back of an envelope on the train is, according to the American Battlefield Trust, most likely a myth: the surviving drafts suggest careful work.4
The town of about 2,400 people filled with as many as 20,000 visitors. Martin Gutmann of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book gives the same picture: a town of 2,500 swelling to 20,000 under clear, crisp skies.5
Two hours and two minutes
On the afternoon of 19 November, after music and a prayer, Everett spoke for two hours. Gutmann counts his oration at 13,607 words, a detailed account of the battle. Then, after a hymn, Lincoln rose.6
He spoke 272 words, in less than three minutes. He began with the founding of the nation: “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.” He said that the living could not truly dedicate the ground, because the men who fought there had already consecrated it. And he closed by asking the listeners to resolve 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.”7
Everett understood at once. The next day he wrote to Lincoln praising the speech for its eloquent simplicity and appropriateness, and wishing that he had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln had in two minutes.8
Five copies, small differences
No recording exists, and accounts of Lincoln's exact words differ. What survives are five manuscript copies in his own hand. Two, given to his secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, are now at the Library of Congress; the Everett copy is in Springfield, Illinois; the Bancroft copy, written for the historian George Bancroft, is at Cornell University; and the Bliss copy, made for Colonel Alexander Bliss, hangs in the Lincoln Room of the White House.9
The texts differ only in small points of spelling, punctuation and wording. The best known difference is the phrase “under God”, which appears in the three later copies but not in the Nicolay and Hay drafts; the American Battlefield Trust notes that three reporters included it in their telegraphed reports of the day, so Lincoln may have added it as he spoke. The Bliss copy is the only one Lincoln signed, and it is the text carved on the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.10
Remembered at Gettysburg
In the national cemetery today the Lincoln Address Memorial honors the speech rather than the man: a bronze bust of Lincoln by Henry Bush-Brown, with the Address on one side and Wills's letter of invitation on the other. The event that was planned as a backdrop to Everett's oration is now remembered almost entirely for the remarks that followed it.11
