The Gettsyburg Address

Today is the 152^nd anniversary of the delivery of the Gettysburg Address.  There are five copies that still exist in Abraham Lincoln’s own handwriting.  Each one is a bit different, as he painstakingly crafted the message he wanted to deliver. 

The Battle of Gettysburg!  In three days of battle 45,000 men were killed, injured, captured, permanently maimed or simply disappeared.   In historian Bruce Catton’s book The Gathering Storm (the first in his multi-volume history of the Civil War) he spoke about the events leading to secession as “…putting the touch of fire to a sleepy little market town called Gettysburg.”   Catton had an historian’s knack for putting the poetic touch to a wasteland of human misery.  Gettysburg was the single bloodiest battle of the Civil War. 

Lincoln was a troubled genius who kept his personal demons at a disciplined distance through tremendous force of will while he conducted the business at hand.  He must have been a remarkable human.  When you read his biography you see time and again that people of power and influence were immediately taken by his worthiness and worked tirelessly to make Abraham Lincoln President of the United States.

It was a job he accepted with sober deliberation.  He was a hands-on President, who was a daily presence in the telegraph room of the War Department.  He knew the carnage that was happening at the Battle of Gettysburg.  The wounded were a daily, bloody, screaming, stinking reality in Washington, D.C. and he was there, in those hospitals, with those veterans, writing the letters to the widows.  In his own words “If there is a place worse than Hell, I am in it.”

The Gettysburg Address is only 272 words.  It can be recited in 2 minutes. Lincoln did not equivocate as to right and wrong.  He did not try to excuse, bestow legitimacy or give a rationale for the secessionists.  He called wrong what it was and showed right for what it is.  He did not apologize for our national failings but celebrated our American vision of a more perfect union.  What had begun, in Lincoln’s mind, as a fight to save the Union, had evolved into a struggle for freedom and equality.  Such a clash of cultures was going to be costly and this prescient man felt the weight—indeed—accepted the burden of that cost in human life. 

The last sentence (five lines long) is the most eloquent vision of democracy that man has ever spoken.  I present Lincoln’s own copy of the address.  He kept the faith.   

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.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- 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.