Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is one of the most analyzed short texts in the English language. It runs 272 words and takes about two minutes to read aloud. It has been memorized by generations of American schoolchildren, cited in Supreme Court opinions, and studied by rhetoricians as a near-perfect example of epideictic oratory — speech that praises and commemorates.
The Context of the Speech
The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, with more than 50,000 casualties over three days. When Lincoln was invited to speak at the cemetery dedication, the principal address was given by Edward Everett, a former senator and the most celebrated orator of the era, who spoke for two hours. Lincoln’s remarks were considered supplementary. Everett wrote to Lincoln the next day: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
What Lincoln Actually Said
Lincoln began not with “our forefathers” but with “our fathers,” and not with the Constitution but with the Declaration of Independence: “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.”
The choice was deliberate. Lincoln dated the nation’s founding to 1776, not 1787, because the Declaration proclaimed equality while the Constitution accommodated slavery. He was reframing the war’s meaning: not a struggle over secession or economic systems, but a test of whether a nation founded on the proposition of equality could survive.
The Five Surviving Manuscripts
Five handwritten copies of the address survive, each with minor differences. The “Bliss copy,” made by Lincoln at the request of Colonel Alexander Bliss in 1864, is considered the authoritative text because Lincoln signed and dated it. It is the version most commonly reproduced.
The Address in Rhetorical Context
Lincoln employed a three-part temporal structure — past, present, future — that gave the short speech the feeling of a complete argument. The past: the founding. The present: the testing. The future: “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 final clause, with its triple repetition, gave the address its most quoted phrase and its most durable civic definition of democratic government.