What Was the Gettysburg Address and Why Does It Matter?
5 min read
The Gettysburg Address was a short speech given by President Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of a national cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the Battle of Gettysburg. It lasted about two minutes. In roughly 270 words, Lincoln recast the Civil War as a struggle to keep alive the idea that "all men are created equal," and to give the nation "a new birth of freedom." It matters because it became the clearest statement of what the war was being fought for, and because it changed how Americans talk about equality and democracy.
What happened at Gettysburg before the speech?
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought in Adams County, Pennsylvania, from July 1 to July 3, 1863. Union forces under Maj. Gen. George G. Meade defeated General Robert E. Lee's Confederate army, ending Lee's second invasion of the North. The American Battlefield Trust puts total casualties at about 51,112 (23,049 Union and 28,063 Confederate) and calls it the bloodiest single battle of the war and its turning point. Estimates vary by source, and the exact Confederate figures are hard to pin down.
The dead were a huge problem for the small town. The National Park Service says Pennsylvania helped pay to rebury an estimated 3,600 Union soldiers in a new Soldiers' National Cemetery, with reburials beginning that fall. The dedication was set for November 19. To understand why the war had reached this point, see what caused the American Civil War.
Who spoke at the dedication, and why was Lincoln's speech so short?
Lincoln was not the main speaker. Edward Everett, one of the most famous orators of the day, gave the keynote, and the National Park Service says it ran nearly two hours. The cemetery committee had asked Lincoln only for "a few appropriate remarks." He gave them in about two minutes.
Everett understood what had happened. He wrote to Lincoln afterward that he wished he could flatter himself that he "came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." Crowd estimates differ: the Smithsonian cites about 10,000 people in Gettysburg for the dedication, while a Gilder Lehrman document says some 15,000 heard Lincoln.
What did Lincoln actually say?
The speech has three movements. The first looks back. It opens with "Four score and seven years ago," meaning 87 years, which takes the listener to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln describes a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Notice that he dates the country's founding to the Declaration, not to the Constitution, which had said little about equality and tolerated slavery.
The second part turns to the present. The war, he says, is testing whether such a nation "can long endure." He then does something unexpected for a dedication speech: he says the living cannot really consecrate the ground, because the soldiers who fought there already did so. In his words, "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." History proved the first half wrong.
The third part turns to the future and gives the living a task: to be "dedicated to the great task remaining before us," so that the dead "shall not have died in vain," that the nation "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."
How did people react at the time?
Reactions split largely along party lines. Historian Gabor Boritt, quoted by Dickinson College's House Divided project, wrote that Republican papers printed overwhelmingly favorable comments, while most Democratic papers ignored the speech or criticized it. The Chicago Tribune praised it as "deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression," while the Chicago Times called it "silly, flat, and dishwatery." The Harrisburg Patriot-News, which dismissed it in 1863 as "silly remarks," formally retracted that judgment in 2013.
Why does the Gettysburg Address still matter?
It matters for three reasons. First, it defines the war's purpose. Lincoln did not mention slavery by name, but by putting equality at the center he tied the Union cause to the principle of the Declaration. Second, it set a model of brevity and plain language that politicians still try to copy. Third, it became part of national memory: it is inscribed at the Lincoln Memorial, and the National Park Service's page on the memorial's inscriptions includes it.
Its promise was also unfinished. The struggle over what "freedom" and "equality" would mean after the war was fought during Reconstruction, and why Reconstruction ended in 1877 shows how far the reality fell short of the words.
Why are there five different handwritten copies?
Only five manuscripts of the address in Lincoln's own hand are known, and they are not identical. According to Cornell University Library and the Smithsonian, the differences are minor wording changes as Lincoln refined the text each time he wrote it out.
- The Nicolay copy (Library of Congress) went to Lincoln's secretary John Nicolay and is often called the "first draft." Scholars disagree over when it was written and whether it was the text Lincoln held at Gettysburg. It lacks the phrase "under God," which appears in contemporary transcriptions of the speech.
- The Hay copy (Library of Congress) went to Lincoln's other secretary, John Hay, and was probably written shortly after Lincoln returned to Washington on November 19. Hay's descendants gave both this and the Nicolay copy to the Library in 1916.
- The Everett and Bancroft copies were written after the dedication at the request of Edward Everett and the historian George Bancroft. The Bancroft copy is at Cornell University, the Everett copy at the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield.
- The Bliss copy, written for Colonel Alexander Bliss, is the one most often reproduced and hangs in the Lincoln Room of the White House. It is the only one with a title, a date and Lincoln's full signature.
Because the manuscripts differ, there is no single "official" text. Some scholars think the exact copy Lincoln read from at the cemetery has been lost. The versions you see printed today usually follow the Bliss copy.