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📘 How to Read the Gettysburg Address

Look at the crowd. Abraham Lincoln is in there, hat off, a dark speck under the third flag from the left. It is November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg, and the Soldiers' National Cemetery is still unfinishe

4
lessons
~20 min
to learn
Adults
level
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What you’ll learn

  1. A cemetery, not a rallyShow that Lincoln's short remarks were a dedication assignment after Everett's oration, spoken over an unfinished cemetery.On November 19, 1863, Lincoln was the second speaker. Wills had asked him for a few appropriate remarks. Everett spoke for two hours and conceded the central idea the next day.
  2. A proposition you can failExplain how the address dates the nation from 1776 and treats equality as a test the war is running.Four score and seven years lands on the Declaration, not the Constitution. The war becomes a test of whether a nation so dedicated can endure, and the living inherit unfinished work.
  3. The last sentence is a chainTrace the closing from what speakers cannot do, through devotion, to a new birth of freedom that is not yet a report.Ceremony cannot consecrate the ground. The dead already have. The famous cadence is the last link in a duty, not a claim that democracy has already succeeded.
  4. Five copies, many afterlivesDistinguish the five handwritten copies and show how later printing and quotation edit the original pressures.Nicolay and Hay are at the Library of Congress. The later three were charity copies. Bliss became the standard wall text, including under God, which the earliest drafts omit.

Questions this course answers

What did David Wills actually ask Lincoln to do on November 19, 1863?

Wills's November 2 letter names Everett as the orator and asks Lincoln, after that oration, to set apart the grounds by a few appropriate remarks.

Match each time frame in the address to the work it does

Lincoln moves from a founding claim through a present test to a duty. Lose any one of those and the last cadence becomes decoration.

Put the closing chain in the order Lincoln builds it

Each clause depends on the one before it. The famous last cadence is the end of a duty, not a separate slogan.

Which two early drafts, now at the Library of Congress, do not include the words under God?

Nicolay and Hay, the two 1863 drafts at the Library of Congress, lack under God. The three later charity copies have the phrase. Whether he said the words on the platform is argued from newspaper reports, not from those two pages.

In your own words, why is it a mistake to treat the Gettysburg Address as a single perfect manuscript?

The Library of Congress holds Nicolay and Hay. The Everett, Bancroft, and Bliss copies were written later for charity. Bliss is signed, dated, and carved on the Lincoln Memorial.

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