What was the Gettysburg Address?

The Gettysburg Address was a brief speech delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history despite its brevity of only 272 words and roughly two minutes in delivery. The cemetery was established to bury the Union dead from the battle, with 3,512 Union soldiers eventually interred in semicircular plots around a central monument. Pennsylvania attorney David Wills had organized the dedication ceremony and invited Edward Everett, the most famous orator of the day, to deliver the keynote. Lincoln was invited as a courtesy to deliver a few appropriate remarks.

The President wrote his short speech on White House stationery, refining it on the train ride to Gettysburg and at the David Wills House the night before the event. Five drafts in Lincoln's hand survive. Everett spoke for two hours. Lincoln then rose, removed his stovepipe hat, and delivered his speech to a crowd of perhaps 15,000.

The speech opens "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." Lincoln dated the founding from the Declaration of Independence of 1776 (87 years before 1863) rather than from the Constitution of 1787, framing the Civil War as a test of whether a nation founded on the proposition of equality could endure. The middle of the speech describes the dedication ceremony and notes that the brave men who fought there had already consecrated the ground beyond the power of any speech to add or detract. The conclusion calls on the living to take increased devotion to the cause for which the dead gave the last full measure of devotion, 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.

The speech's themes are remarkable. It said almost nothing about the specific battle, the immediate war, or even Gettysburg itself. Instead it reframed the meaning of the war as a struggle to fulfill the equality promise of the Declaration. It used three time periods (the founding, the present war, and the future) to argue that the Union's survival required dedication to that promise.

Newspaper reaction was mixed at first. The Chicago Times called it silly remarks. Edward Everett wrote Lincoln on November 20, 1863 saying he wished he could have come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln did in two minutes.