For over two hours, one of the great orators of his day did his absolute best to eulogize the honored dead buried all around him. Standing on the very field where, mere months earlier, tens of thousands of American Soldiers fought to the last, former politician Edward Everett invoked memories of famed heroes and battles from Ancient Greece to the English Civil War. His 13,000-ish word speech undoubtedly impressed the crowd of over 10,000 people, some of whom may have wondered how anyone else could possibly top it.

And yet few people remember anything he said that day. Because after Everett finished his speech, the next speaker arose and, in less than 300 words, delivered one of the most famous pieces of oratory in American history. The man was President Abraham Lincoln, and the brief remarks he made on November 19th, 1863, are now known as the Gettysburg Address.

The Battle of Gettysburg

Over the course of three sweltering summer days, Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee clashed again and again with Union troops led by General George Meade in the fields and hills surrounding the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

As part of Lee’s attempt to relieve pressure on Virginia—where most of the eastern-theater fighting had occurred—and to threaten major cities such as Washington, D.C., the battle became one of the few Civil War engagements fought north of the Mason–Dixon line. Union forces followed close behind, doing everything they could to stay between Lee’s army and the national capital.

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The two forces finally collided on July 1st. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia tried again and again to defeat or break through Meade’s Army of the Potomac. His repeated failed attempts culminated in an infamously disastrous direct assault on Union lines, wherein over 12,000 infantrymen charged across a mile of open ground towards the center of the federal position.

The attack failed spectacularly, with roughly half of the attacking troops killed or wounded. This led Lee to turn his defeated army southward and begin the long march back to friendly territory. The American Civil War dragged on for two more brutal, bloody years, but the Union victory at Gettysburg (coupled with General Ulysses S. Grant’s successful capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the war’s western theater a day later) is widely considered the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.

The Dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery

The idea to establish a national cemetery on the site of what remains the bloodiest battle in American history arose almost immediately after it ended. With so many hastily buried in shallow graves near where they breathed their last breath, officials at the local, state, and national levels quickly began work to establish a formal burying ground to memorialize the fallen.

By the end of October, the process of re-burying the thousands of troops slain there had begun. And while it would not be complete for some time, an official dedication ceremony for what would be known as the Soldier’s National Cemetery was scheduled for November 19th, a mere four and a half months after the battle’s end.

Among those slated to speak was the man slated to give the main oratory, Mr. Everett, and the man who would formalize the dedication ceremony, President Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address

There’s an often-repeated myth popular among history fun fact lovers that Lincoln conceived of and wrote the speech he planned to give at the dedication ceremony on the train ride from D.C.

But most historians agree he began drafting his words days or weeks before. As clever and adept a writer as Lincoln was, it seems unlikely he would have left the drafting of a speech to be given at such a meaningful event to the last minute.

But given that he hadn’t even received an invitation to the event until November 2nd, the fact that he came up with such a legendary piece of writing in such a short time is (in the opinion of this humble writer) still nothing short of extraordinary.

The ceremony began at 10am with a formal procession. After that, Everett gave his speech, followed by a musical performance. Then, the president stood and began:

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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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.

After he finished came further music and a prayer. President Lincoln attended service at a local church, and then boarded a train back to Washington. His speech was but a small part of the day’s events. But it would go on to become the most remembered part.

Reaction to the Gettysburg Address

Initial reactions to the speech in the press and among public figures were fairly predictable: outlets, politicians, and others opposed to Lincoln, the war, and/or the Union derided it. One Pennsylvania newspaper even referred to it as “the silly remarks of the President.”

But the President’s supporters, the newspapers, and people who supported the fight for Union and abolition praised the Gettysburg Address in no uncertain terms.

The Chicago Tribune presciently proclaimed, “The dedicatory remarks by President Lincoln will live among the annals of man,” and renowned journalist Horace Greeley remarked, “I doubt that our national literature contains a finer gem than that little speech at the Gettysburg celebration, November 19, 1863… after the close of Mr. Everett’s classic but frigid oration.”

The Legacy of the Gettysburg Address

The speech Lincoln gave that November afternoon dedicating a national cemetery to serve as the final resting place of the thousands of Soldiers who died at Gettysburg has gone on to become one of the most widely remembered, recited, and quoted passages of writing in our nation’s history. Its words are etched into the collective memory of our country, not to mention the marble walls of the Lincoln Memorial.

In addition to that striking reprint and countless others like it that grace the walls of classrooms, museums, libraries, and more (including the framed one hanging above the bookshelf in this writer’s office), five copies of the Gettysburg Address handwritten by Lincoln himself are known to exist, all referred to by the names of the people the president personally gave them to. One belonged to none other than Edward Everett, the man the president so historically upstaged, who wrote Lincoln to request a copy of the speech, saying, “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.”

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