November 19th marks the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
Throughout 1863, the war began turning the North’s way. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in three days of fighting, that left 40,000 dead and wounded, Robert E. Lee was given his worst defeat so far. News of the Union victory reached Lincoln on July 4, the same day that Ulysses S. Grant took the vital city of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Lincoln was impressed that the twin victories had come on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, because he said the rebels were trying to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal. This, he said, is a glorious theme for a speech. And that speech would come a few months later at Gettysburg itself.
A war cemetery was being dedicated there, and Lincoln was invited to make a few appropriate remarks. At the ceremony in November, the president listened for two hours as the designated orator, Edward Everett, recalled the Gettysburg battle. People were expecting another long speech when Lincoln rose, but he sat down again just two minutes later before photographers could capture him speaking. He’d needed only 10 sentences to distill the essence of the Union cause and why the North must keep fighting.
“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.”
As he sat down, Lincoln is alleged to have said “that speech won’t scour,” an uncomplimentary farming term. But the other speaker, Edward Everett told him, “I wish I had come as close to the central meaning of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.” And The Chicago Tribune accurately predicted that the speech will live among the annals of man.
Explore the database, Films on Demand for videos about President Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, and the Civil War. The above text is the transcript of a Biography episode, Abraham Lincoln: Preserving the Union, found in Films on Demand.
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