November 19, 1863 was the date of the immortalized speech given by our US President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg.
The main address at the dedication ceremony was a two-hour speech delivered by Edward Everett, the best-known orator of the time. Steeped in the tradition of ancient Greek oratory, Everett’s speech was some 13,000 words long, but he delivered it without notes.
In the wake of such a performance, Lincoln’s brief speech (just 272 words long) would hardly seem to have drawn notice.
However, despite some criticism from his opposition, it was widely quoted and praised and soon came to be recognized as one of the classic utterances of all time, a masterpiece of prose poetry.
On the day following the ceremony, Everett himself wrote to Lincoln, “I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
A few things that are not widely known about this historical occasion were...
1. After so much grief and loss, people in the North felt a turning point had come with the Battle of Gettysburg. and they wanted to be there for the dedication of the national cemetery for the Union war dead. Fifteen thousand people came to the town for the dedication, knowing it would be a momentous and historic occasion. The problem was Gettysburg was a town of only 2,500 people. Visitors doubled and tripled up in beds. A prominent Adams County attorney David Wills had 38 lodgers staying at his home the night before the speeches - despite a very pregnant Mrs. Wills. Even the governor of Pennsylvania had to share a bed. The only two guests in the Wills House to get their own beds were Everett and the President.
2. The night before the dedication, Lincoln addressed a couple hundred people who had gathered in the square below the Wills House. He made a couple jokes and mostly told the restless crowd to wait for his formal speech the following day.
Lincoln then went inside to make final word changes and put the last polish on his famous speech. Contrary to popular belief that he wrote the speech on the fly while traveling by train to Gettysburg, Lincoln had worked hard on the speech, and historians know of at least two prior drafts.
3. As the dedication ceremony got underway, soldiers and dignitaries marched up Baltimore Street to Cemetery Hill. But a burial party of a half a dozen people, including one white man and several black men, were burying a number of corpses nearby. This helped set the appropriate somber mood of the commemoration.
4. In the speech, Lincoln focuses on the ideal set forth “four score and seven years ago” in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” Whereas slaveholders at the time argued that they had a constitutional right to own slaves, Lincoln called on America to welcome a “new birth of freedom,” implying that the U.S. Constitution must change to embrace equal rights for all.
5. Lincoln was captured in a photo of the crowd at the ceremony, with his head visible in the mass of people. Historians speculate that the brevity of Lincoln’s remarks prevented photographers from setting up their complicated equipment in time to catch the president while still on stage. The photograph was taken by 18-year-old David Bachrach, who would later be known as the uncle of writer Gertrude Stein.
In honor of its 158th anniversary, I hope you enjoyed traveling back in time to visit some remembered & not so well remembered facts about the Gettysburg Address and Abraham Lincoln.
I hope ya'll have a wonderful day!
Nana
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