The Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address, which was a speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln on November 19th, 1863, was one of the most memorable speeches in the history of the United States. The famous speech that starts “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” was delivered at the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania because that is where the bloodiest battle of the Civil War was held. Lincoln seemed to want to not only honor those who had fallen in the war but also rally support for his upcoming presidency, which had become increasingly unpopular in the past couple of months due to the amount of bloodshed from the war. (1)
The speech, as a whole, was delivered in less than three minutes and was around three hundred words. Its lasting impact is still referenced today and it is engraved in his statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lincoln used his three minutes to keep pushing for the Union and for reunifying the country. Even though Lincoln’s speech was clearly in support of the Union, he talked more about the impact of the battle as a whole and how the lives that were lost and all of the wounded soldiers would affect the nation greatly. These lives that he was talking about were not just the lives of the Union soldiers, but also the lives of the Confederate soldiers. His speech has been widely referenced since the day he made it. It is even referenced in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. (2) The fact that a three-minute speech is still so widely known today just goes to show how impactful this speech was for its time.
Abraham Lincoln was not the only speaker on that day. A popular speaker by the name of Edward Everett also spoke on November 19th, 1863. Abraham Lincoln was not even supposed to speak and was actually the second choice after Everett. Most people thought that Everett’s speech would have been more impactful than Lincoln’s, but Lincoln’s was so short that it was actually printed and went everywhere. It is said that the people who were actually in Gettysburg at the time enjoyed Everett’s speech more and thought that Lincoln’s speech was entirely too short. Lincoln’s speech was actually able to be remembered more due to the fact that it was so short. It was printed everywhere, and soon enough, the whole country was able to read the speech. Lincoln was not even supposed to speak, wrote an under three-minute speech, and now it is one of the most memorable speeches of all time in American History. (3) This is a very impressive thing to do. He was asked so last minute that he barely even had time to write it as well!
Works Cited
Lincoln, Abraham, and Greta Gard. “‘The Gettysburg Address.’” The Literature of War, edited by Thomas Riggs, 1st ed., Gale, 2012. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NDIzMzExNw==?aid=23741.
Stripp, Fred. “The Other Gettysburg Address.” Civil War History, The Kent State University Press, 2 Jan. 2013, muse.jhu.edu/article/414812/summary.
Fesler, J. W. “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.” Indiana Magazine of History, vol. 40, no. 3, 1944, pp. 209–26. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27787441. Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.
