Lincoln Redefines America: The Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln spoke for roughly two minutes at the dedication of a military cemetery in Pennsylvania, and in 272 words redefined what the United States meant. The Gettysburg Address, delivered four and a half months after the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, transformed the conflict from a legal dispute over secession into a moral crusade for human equality, and it remains the most influential speech in American history. Lincoln was not the featured speaker. That honor belonged to Edward Everett, the most celebrated orator of the age, who delivered a two-hour address analyzing the battle in exhaustive detail. Lincoln was invited almost as an afterthought, asked to offer "a few appropriate remarks" following Everett's main oration. The president arrived in Gettysburg the evening before and worked on his text at the home of Judge David Wills, though the popular story that he scribbled the speech on the back of an envelope during the train ride is a myth. The speech was radical in ways that are easy to miss from the distance of 160 years. Lincoln opened with "Four score and seven years ago," dating the nation's founding to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence rather than to 1787 and the Constitution. This was a deliberate choice. The Constitution had accommodated slavery; the Declaration proclaimed that all men are created equal. By anchoring the nation's purpose in the earlier document, Lincoln was arguing that the United States had been founded on a promise of equality that the war was now being fought to fulfill. Lincoln did not mention the Confederacy, slavery, or any specific political issue. He spoke instead of sacrifice, democratic government, and "a new birth of freedom." The language was plain, Anglo-Saxon, almost biblical in its rhythms. The concluding phrase, "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," compressed an entire political philosophy into fifteen words.