Gettysburg Address
The 272-word, two-minute speech in which Lincoln recast the Civil War as a test of whether democracy could survive.
It took Lincoln a little over two minutes and 272 words to redefine the country, and he was not even the main speaker. On November 19, 1863, the featured orator Edward Everett spoke for two hours at the dedication of the cemetery for the Union dead at Gettysburg; Lincoln followed with ten sentences and sat down. Everett wrote to the president the next day that he wished he had come as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln had in two minutes.
The bloodiest hinge
The occasion was the burial ground of the war's deadliest battle. Over three days in early July 1863, the armies of Robert E. Lee and George Meade collided at the Pennsylvania crossroads town of Gettysburg and produced roughly 50,000 casualties, the costliest engagement ever fought in North America. Lee's failed assault on the third day, later called the high-water mark of the Confederacy, ended his invasion of the North and sent his army back to Virginia for good. Four months later the town was still burying its dead, and the new national cemetery needed dedicating. That was the setting.
Ten sentences that moved the founding
Lincoln did something audacious in those sentences. He reached past the Constitution, which protected slavery, to the Declaration of Independence and its claim that all men are created equal, and he treated that claim as the true origin of the nation, 'four score and seven years' back to 1776. He recast the war not as a struggle to restore a union of states but as a test of whether any nation 'so conceived and so dedicated' could long endure. And he closed with a pledge that the dead would give the living cause for 'a new birth of freedom,' so that 'government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' In barely a paragraph he turned a military cemetery into an argument for democracy itself.
Legend and afterlife
The speech gathered myths as it rose. Lincoln did not scribble it on the back of an envelope on the train, a story invented decades later; he drafted and revised it with care and kept refining the wording afterward. Nor was it met with silence or scorn on the day, whatever the tales of a snubbed and booed president suggest. Its reputation grew slowly and then overwhelmingly, until the words were carved into the wall of the Lincoln Memorial and taught as something close to national scripture. What began as brief remarks at a burial has become the most quoted statement of the democratic ideal in the English language, the passage Americans still reach for when they try to say what self-government is supposed to mean.