19 November 1863
Abraham Lincoln said simply in a sentence something it can take whole books to complicate. If there were a manifesto for democratic politics, Lincoln’s most famous line might be too long to be the title, but it would certainly offer the subtitle. Given that he could cram so much into ten words, it is a wonder he needed all of 272 for the whole speech.
Abraham Lincoln was not, however, the man who really delivered the Gettysburg Address. That honour goes to the forgotten orator Edward Everett, who was top of the bill on the Pennsylvania battlefield in November 1863, to speak the funeral eulogy after the poets Longfellow, Whittier and Bryant turned the invitation down. Lincoln’s task was to come on afterwards and do what were, by comparison with Everett’s lavish address, parish notices. It is the greatest example of stealing the show in all the arts.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) served as the sixteenth president of the United States of America from March 1861 until his assassination by a resentful Confederate-supporting actor, John Wilkes Booth, in Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865. He is one of the icons of American democracy, famously immortalised at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. His is the name most often summoned in the speeches of the presidents who followed him. He is the re-founding father of the American constitution.
Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, the son of a frontiersman. It was, according to Lincoln himself, ‘a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods’. It was not a literate childhood, and in later life he thought himself lucky to be able to ‘read, write and cipher’. Political opponents would later patronise him by wondering how a man of such unpromising literary beginnings could command the language as he did. The answer is bound to be a mystery, especially as he was a self-effacing man. In the words of the writer and diplomat John Bigelow: ‘He [Lincoln] was so modest by nature that he was perfectly content to walk behind any man who wished to walk before him.’
Lincoln’s political career began when he joined the Illinois state legislature in 1834 and, self-taught in the law, was admitted to the Bar in 1837. ‘His ambition’, said his law partner, ‘was a little engine that knew no rest.’ This led Lincoln to a term in the House of Representatives between 1847 and 1849. His political zeal was awakened by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.
A reputation as an eloquent opponent of slavery helped Lincoln secure the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1860. It is also the source of his indelible reputation as one of the great presidents of the American republic. Lincoln’s moral stature on slavery infused his leadership throughout the Civil War and helped to preserve the Union during a spell of potentially terminal peril. As if all that were not enough, there is something else to reinforce the abiding myth of Abraham Lincoln in American life. He is the frontiersman who made it to the White House. He is the incarnate American dream. The man who showed that virtue derives from public service rather than noble birth.
Fourscore 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.
The first thing you notice about the Gettysburg Address is its length; just 272 words compressed into ten sentences. It challenges every other writer to cut. The famous final words encapsulate the whole in just ten words. Of the 272 words, 204 are of a single syllable, mostly of Anglo-Saxon or Norman derivation, like ordinary speech. High political rhetoric until Lincoln had tended to look to Rome or Greece, for both structure and vocabulary. The phrase ‘conceived in liberty’ is an echo of Cicero’s argument that the only constitution in which a citizen can flourish is a republic. But stylistically, Lincoln here exemplifies the link between successful oratory and plain speech. Great rhetorical prose is not complex. It is ordinary speech elevated to the heights.
The entire text can be read out in under two minutes, and the concision is all the more marked by the fact that the audience had waited so long for it. The procession that had escorted Lincoln to the field had been greatly delayed. Everett, the day’s main orator, then took his time getting to the platform. Before he spoke there was a lengthy prayer and some music, and then he spoke for all of two hours. By the time Lincoln rose to the lectern, the audience had been on its feet for close to four hours.
It was worth the wait. The opening words are a date spoken in a musical cadence, but also more than that. ‘Fourscore and seven years’ takes the listener back from 1863 to 1776, the moment of the Declaration of Independence, rather than to 1791, the signing of the Constitution. Lincoln is making a critical point: he is saying that the ideals of the revolution have been violated in the Civil War. If the war is to honour the dead it must be fought for a purpose higher merely than preserving the Union. It must hark back to the founding idea that ‘all men are created equal’. Without once mentioning the word, Lincoln is talking about slavery. In January of 1863 Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery is nowhere in his text but it is everywhere.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
The repetition of the word ‘nation’, which recurs five times, shows what, and how much, Lincoln believes to be at stake. The words ‘nation’ and ‘birth’ share a common root and often come back together at moments of heightened rhetoric. As early as the second sentence, Lincoln upsets the equilibrium he has established in the first. The nation, defined in the respect for the equal moral worth of all, is placed in peril in a single crisp sentence.
To say so much so quickly requires complete control, which raises the question of how a text so learned could be composed by a man of such jejune education. Writers are often asked where their ideas come from. The best answer may be Larkin’s: ‘pure genius’. Fitzgerald perhaps came closer to the truth when he wrote, in a letter to his daughter which described exactly what he never did himself, that a good style forms through good reading. Lincoln is known to have read Aesop’s Fables. Robert Burns was his favourite poet and he knew both the Bible and Shakespeare. There is, though, some magical property in verbal composition that can make a novelty out of a reading list, and Lincoln had that mesmerising quality.
We know that the words are Lincoln’s own because we have the testimony of his private secretary, John G. Nicolay, who saw the text, written in ink, in Lincoln’s hand. Nicolay also points to an important truth when he says that Lincoln wrote half the speech the day before he left Washington and the other half when he arrived in Gettysburg. Political speech has a short half-life. It goes stale fast and should therefore be composed as close to the deadline as possible. Bad writers are apt to think they will get better by taking longer, but taking pains can simply add to the agony.
This is quite different from the myth, which first appeared in a 1906 book by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews called The Perfect Tribute, that Lincoln was so slapdash that he composed the speech, literally, on the back of an envelope. The Gettysburg Address attracts myths. Harriet Beecher Stowe also claimed that Lincoln had written the speech in a few moments, and Andrew Carnegie insisted that Lincoln had used his pen. Don’t believe a word of it. It is clear from the finished version, let alone from the surviving manuscripts, that, though the craft cut close to the deadline, Lincoln himself worked on it until he had the desired effect.
We are met on a great battle-field 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.
Lincoln is taking a risk with this speech. He is speaking at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four months after the Confederacy forces were defeated there by the Union armies in the only battle in the war to be fought on Northern soil. More
