Gettysburg Address - the 150th anniversary: A Q&A on history's greatest speech

Jim Miller | The Star-Ledger By Jim Miller | The Star-Ledger The Star-Ledger
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on November 17, 2013 at 8:00 AM, updated November 18, 2013 at 10:50 AM
Lincoln portrait.JPGAbraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States 

What made the Gettysburg Address one of America’s greatest speeches?

It’s a speech we’re all taught, and its words are woven into the fabric of our nation’s history. “Four score and seven years ago … ”

It was, in fact, 150 years ago this week — Nov. 19, 1863 — when President Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, Pa., to help dedicate the cemetery at the battlefield where, 4½ months earlier, 165,000 soldiers in blue and gray fought, with 51,000 casualties.

The battle turned the direction of the Civil War in the Union Army’s favor.

Lincoln had intended the address to honor the dead, but he also saw it as an opportunity to frame the 31-month-old war in a new light, to provide a new meaning for the bloody conflict, to apply a greater universality of freedom in reaffirming the Declaration of Independence. His Emancipation Proclamation, effective at the beginning of the year, had freed slaves, but only those in states belonging to the Confederacy. The address would be another major step toward freeing all slaves two years later with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

Lincoln was an artist with the English language, and his 272-word Gettysburg Address was his masterpiece. Concise, vivid, deep in meaning, it remains a model for historians and composition experts alike.

Douglas L. Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Lincoln and his work. He has authored numerous papers and books, including “Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), which was awarded the Lincoln Prize. He was also a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s critically acclaimed 2012 film “Lincoln.”

With the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address approaching, Wilson explained to The Star-Ledger some of the reasons we still marvel at Lincoln’s words today.

Q. “Four score and seven years ago” was a very poetic and memorable way to begin the address. What was his purpose with these critical first words?

A. Lincoln’s opening his speech with a familiar biblical phrase was clearly a deliberate attempt to catch the audience’s attention and, at the same time, lend a certain gravity to his address. Four months earlier, at a celebration of the simultaneous victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, he had pronounced what looks like a rough draft of his first sentence at Gettysburg: “How long ago was it? Eighty-odd years, since upon the Fourth of July, for the first time in the world, a union body of representatives was assembled to declare as a self-evident truth that all men were created equal.”

What is most notable here is that in the process of refining this sentence for its new context, Lincoln would not only make the opening words more ear-catching, but he also reconstructed it so that it had the appearance of being a patriotic commonplace but was actually, for his critics, a brilliant verbal finesse.


Presumably no patriotic American would disagree with that. It is only when the second sentence asserts that the war is about whether a nation “so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” that Lincoln shows his hand. The war was about human equality? Not surprisingly, his critics were quick to point out that what had begun as a war to preserve the Union had somehow become something else — something more ambitious, and more controversial. And so it had.

Q. At the dedication, Lincoln followed featured orator Edward Everett, who spoke for two hours. Lincoln spoke for maybe two minutes. That must have felt like quite a letdown to the audience. What was the immediate reaction?

A. There was a widely reported awkwardness that followed Lincoln’s remarks, as well as indications that he himself feared that he had disappointed his audience. But given the prevailing conditions, both of these phenomena are understandable.

It is safe to say that no one expected a speech that, by standards of the day, ended before it had really gotten started. It was said that a photographer who had stationed himself directly in front of the platform was still adjusting his camera when Lincoln finished his speech.

If there was a hesitation in the crowd’s applause, it was more likely due to the startling brevity of the speech, rather than disappointment with the president’s remarks.

Q. How did Lincoln compress so much emotion and so much history into a mere 272 words?

A. The brevity of the Gettysburg Address remains its most distinctive feature, and it was likely an aspect of the speech that Lincoln decided on very early. Even before it was finished, he reportedly told a friend that it was to be “short, short, short,” suggesting this was a key part of its design.

Contrary to our common-sense assumption, brevity in serious writing is dauntingly difficult to achieve, and means investing more time, not less. Edward Everett, who well understood these matters, wrote Lincoln the day after the speech, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Just how Lincoln performed this miracle is much more difficult to explain, but let’s take one rhetorical feature not often discussed, Lincoln’s strategic use of the negative. Most people understand intuitively, if not consciously, that using the negative form of an expression often strengthens its force. Thus, two of the resolutions that conclude the speech are “that these dead shall not have died in vain” and that self-government “shall not perish from the earth.”

In a more complex example, referring to a dedication ceremony to consecrate or sanctify a portion of a famous battlefield, Lincoln could say “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground.” Here it becomes evident that repetition can also help to amplify one’s expression, and that the combined use of repetition and the rhetorical negative gives the expression a perceptible emotional effect.

Q. Lincoln quotes Jefferson from the Declaration of Independence by mentioning “all men are created equal.” Did Lincoln truly believe in this, or was it just political posturing?

A. The speeches that brought Lincoln to national attention in the 1850s leave no doubt of his commitment to the declaration’s claim that “all men are created equal.” When other politicians were shying away from the declaration and calling it “self-evident lies,” Lincoln took the opposite tack, urging that equality was the “central idea” in American politics. This was why slavery was the key problem.

“If the negro is a man,” Lincoln said in 1854, “why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” He then went on to argue that slavery was incompatible with self-government, which was the basic principle of American democracy. “Allow ALL the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only is self-government.” To the objection that this was too idealistic and too remote from the prevailing circumstances, Lincoln argued that the “constant working” of American public opinion “has been a steady progress toward the practical equality of all men.”

Q. Lincoln stated, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” Did he really have no clue his speech would be revered so greatly?

A. The first thing to note is that, though beautifully and memorably phrased, this is an oratorical convention, a variation of which is quite familiar. “Nothing I can say here today can do justice to … ” Lincoln is here employing it to emphasize the magnitude of the soldiers’ sacrifice. That he is exaggerating — “but (the world) can never forget what they did here” — is understood as poetic license and part of the convention.

The irony, of course, from our point of view, is that the speech today is famous and even familiar around the world, and certainly ranks as one of the most admired and memorable speeches of all time.

While I doubt very much that Lincoln could have had any sense of that, others did. The opinion of Sen. Charles Sumner, the learned and imposing Republican leader from Massachusetts, was described by a friend as follows: “Of all the speeches he ever read, in any language, by any man living or dead, he thought Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech was the greatest.”

Lincoln said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it never can forget what they did here.” Sumner said, “The speech would live when the memory of the battle would be lost, or only be remembered because of the speech.”

Jim Miller is deputy editor of The Star-Ledger’s editorial board:






(Editor’s note: This is the Bliss copy of the address. It is the final version Lincoln wrote and is the most often reproduced.)