Gettysburg Address

Gettysburg Address

Part of the Eastern theater of the American Civil War
One of only two confirmed photos of Lincoln (seated in center facing camera) at Gettysburg,[1][2][3] taken about noon on November 19, 1863; some three hours later, Lincoln delivered the famed address. To Lincoln's right is Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln's bodyguard.
Date	November 19, 1863; 161 years ago (November 19, 1863)

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The Gettysburg Address is a speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, following the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. The speech has come to be viewed as one of the most famous, enduring, and historically significant speeches in American history.

Lincoln delivered the speech on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, during a formal dedication of Soldiers' National Cemetery, now known as Gettysburg National Cemetery, on the grounds where the Battle of Gettysburg was fought four and a half months earlier, between July 1 and July 3, 1863, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In the battle, Union army soldiers successfully repelled and defeated Confederate forces in what proved to be both the Civil War's deadliest and most decisive battle, resulting in over 50,000 Confederate and Union army casualties in a Union victory, which altered the war's course in the Union's favor.^[4][5]

The historical and enduring significance and fame of the Gettysburg Address is at least partly attributable to its conscious brevity, including only 271 words and comprising less than two minutes before a crowd of approximately 15,000 people, which gathered to join in commemorating the sacrifice of the Union soldiers, over 23,000 of whom were killed over the three day Battle of Gettysburg. In his brief but historical speech, Lincoln described the Union's cause in the Civil War as necessary to validate that the sovereignty and freedoms the nation successfully secured less than nine decades earlier in the American Revolution, Revolutionary War, and nation's establishment, could prove enduring.

Despite the historical significance and fame that the speech ultimately obtained, Lincoln was not intended to serve as the primary speaker at the cemetery's dedication that day, and his brief speech consumed a very small fraction of the day's event, which lasted for several hours. Nor was Lincoln's address immediately recognized as particularly significant. Over time, however, it came to be viewed widely as one of the greatest and most influential statements ever delivered on the American national purpose, enduring in significance throughout the nation's history, and also as one of the most prominent examples of the successful use of the English language and rhetoric to advance a political cause. "The Gettysburg Address did not enter the broader American canon until decades after Lincoln’s death, following World War I and the 1922 opening of the Lincoln Memorial, where the speech is etched in marble. As the Gettysburg Address gained in popularity, it became a staple of school textbooks and readers, and the succinctness of the three paragraph oration permitted it to be memorized by generations of American school children," the History Channel reported in November 2024.^[6]

Lincoln began his 271-word address in Gettysburg with the now famed phrase, "Four score and seven years ago", a reference to the nation's founding in the American Revolution, during which the Founding Fathers ultimately concluded that they could not reconcile their differences with King George III and instead needed to enjoin and prevail in the Revolutionary War in pursuit of full independence from British colonial rule. In 1775, the Second Continental Congress, convened in the revolutionary capital of Philadelphia, then established the Continental Army and elected George Washington as its commander-in-chief against the British. The following year, in 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted and issued the Declaration of Independence, which detailed why the Thirteen Colonies believed they were free and independent from British colonial rule.^[7]

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln prominently referenced the nation's founding, describing it as having been "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal", a reference to a phrase incorporated into the Declaration by Thomas Jefferson. Lincoln described the Civil War as questioning and testing whether such a nation could endure, extolled the sacrifices of the thousands who died in the Battle of Gettysburg in defense of those principles, and then argued that their sacrifice should elevate the nation's commitment to ensuring the Union prevailed and the nation endured, famously saying:

that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom^[8]—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.^[9][10]