The Gettysburg Address was a speech delivered by US President Abraham Lincoln on 19 November 1863. It was given during the formal dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery - now the Gettysburg National Cemetery - on the site where the bloody Battle of Gettysburg had been fought in the American Civil War just four months earlier. Only 271 words long, the speech argued that the soldiers who had fallen at Gettysburg and other battlefields had not died in vain, that their sacrifice had been made to preserve the Union and all the principles it stood for - primarily including that of human equality. The address remains one of the most important and oft-quoted speeches in US history.
Background
On 1 July 1863, the blue summer skies above Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, came alive with the sounds of war. Elements of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, ragged and unshod as they were, had wandered into the town ostensibly to look for shoes; what they found instead were dismounted Union cavalry troopers. The ensuing skirmish escalated into a three-day battle of apocalyptic proportions, the scale and devastation of which had never before been seen on American soil. Ultimately, the rebels were defeated, their second - and final - attempt to invade the North coming to naught but blood and death.
Indeed, as the Army of Northern Virginia began its sad, slow limp back South, the bodies of the dead and wounded remained behind on the battle-scarred fields of Gettysburg, slowly covered by the torrential rains that fell throughout the day on 4 July. An estimated 50,000 men had been killed, wounded, or missing during those three bloody July days. And this was just one battle. These past three years, horrified Americans had been forced to look on as their nation tore itself apart, as their fathers, sons, and brothers brutally murdered one another in the dirt and mud.
By the time the smoke settled after the Battle of Gettysburg, US citizens could perhaps be forgiven for asking some uncomfortable questions: was all this blood and death and carnage really worth it? What was it all about, anyway? Why should there be so much death just to keep a few errant states in the Union? War-weariness began to take hold over the North. A growing faction within the Democratic Party - known as Peace Democrats, or Copperheads - began to loudly demand a peace settlement, even if that meant letting the Confederate States have their independence.
Naturally, during this time of unease, all eyes turned to US President Abraham Lincoln, to whom this great question - the why of it all - was more personal than most. After all, it had been Lincoln’s election in 1860 that had triggered this great conflict in the first place. It had been he who had called for 75,000 volunteers to crush the rebellion, he who had spoken so forcefully about the need to prosecute the war, to bring the wayward Southern states back into the embrace of Union. If such a man as this could not answer the question about why this war needed to be fought, then surely no one could.
Lincoln had always known that the nation was at a point of crisis, that it would have to suffer the wrath of the storm in order to come out the other side in one piece. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he had once told a group of eager listeners in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, five years before. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other" (quoted by the US National Park Service).
This sentiment had always lingered in the back of Lincoln’s mind, even during the earliest months of his presidency, when he had tried to avoid an all-out war with the slaveholding South. His primary purpose had always been to preserve the Union; but as the war dragged on, Lincoln’s mind was drawn back to his own idea that the soil of the nation must become either completely free or completely enslaved. On 1 January 1863, he finally moved to make the war about something more than just fighting a rebellion. His Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves throughout the South, a precursor to the more encompassing abolition that many hoped was soon to come. By doing so, Lincoln had begun to answer the question - the war was not only about preserving the Union, but about protecting all that it represented, including the promise that “all men are created equal”.
Lincoln Goes to Gettysburg
In November 1863, four months after the last shots had been fired over the fields of Gettysburg, President Lincoln came to the small Pennsylvania town. He had been invited by local attorney David Wills to speak at the consecration of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. This cemetery, of course, was created as the final resting place for 3,500 of the Union soldiers killed in the battle. Lincoln left Washington, D.C. at around noon on 18 November, accompanied by three cabinet members and several other officials. They arrived in Gettysburg that afternoon, and Lincoln spent the night as a guest in Wills’s home. The next morning, 19 November, the president had breakfast and dressed in his customary black suit. He spent a few minutes putting the finishing touches on his speech, which he had spent the past few days drafting.
Lincoln arrived at the cemetery at around 11:15 am. The place was packed - there were about 15,000 spectators present, among them six state governors. As Lincoln moved amongst them, a general silence settled upon the crowd, and people removed their hats as a gesture of respect. Though the president was undoubtedly the most anticipated speaker, he would not be giving the main address; that honor fell to Edward Everett, a politician from Massachusetts and former secretary of state.
Everett spoke for nearly two hours, dramatically describing the events of the battle and accusing the Confederates of committing an act against God. “To levy war against the United States is the constitutional definition of treason,” Everett proclaimed, “and that crime is…an imitation on earth of that first foul revolt of ‘the Infernal Serpent’ against which the Supreme Majesty of Heaven sent forth the armed myriads of angels” (quoted in Meacham, 311). When Everett had finished speaking, a hymn was sung. Then, at around 2 pm, the president rose, put on his glasses, took out “two pages of manuscript from his pocket” and began to speak (ibid).
It took Lincoln two minutes to deliver the Gettysburg Address, arguably the most important speech of his career. In it, Lincoln definitively answers the great question about why the war was being fought, tying the preservation of the Union to the greater mission of ending slavery and creating equality for all. The United States, Lincoln argues, was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”; it is therefore necessary to fight to defend that nation, in order to protect the freedom and liberty that it represents. When the speech was done, a reporter leaned in and asked the president if that was all. “Yes,” Lincoln replied. John Hay, an assistant secretary for Lincoln, would remember that the president “in a firm free way, with more grace than is his wont said his half dozen lines of consecration and the music wailed and we went home through crowded and cheering streets” (quoted in Meacham, 313).
Importance
The Gettysburg Address (transcribed in full in the next section) is considered one of the most important speeches in US history. Historian John Meacham, in his book And There Was Light, explains why:
The speech distilled decades of Lincoln’s thinking. It echoed elements of Theodore Parker, of George Bancroft, of Louis Kossuth, and of the King James Version of the Bible. A cogent case not only for a democracy of white men but for the freedom of the enslaved, the Gettysburg Address was a defense of popular government, of emancipation, and of the principle of equality. A nation ‘under God’ could not forever resist the dictates of that God - and Lincoln took the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to mean that human equality was innate. If this were true, then restrictions or barriers to the recognition of that equality - to granting all the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - were in conflict with conscience…The Gettysburg Address was an eloquent attempt to frame American politics as not only a mediation of interests but as a moral undertaking. Slave owners portrayed slavery as divinely ordained; Lincoln portrayed individual liberty as God-given (313-14).
Gettysburg Adress Text
(Text sourced from the Library of Congress).
Delivered at Gettysburg, Pa.
November 19, 1863.
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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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.
