Gettysburg Address

Impact

The extreme brevity of Lincoln's address caught his audience by surprise. As Doris Kearns Goodwin reported, one eyewitness said, “The assemblage stood motionless and silent” (Goodwin, p. 586). Although Lincoln seemed to doubt the success of his speech, Edward Everett, who later asked for a copy of the Gettysburg Address, wrote to the president, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours as you did in two minutes” (Goodwin, p. 586).

As biographer David Donald notes, Lincoln's speech gave an expansive view of the nation's future. Although many newspapers devoted major coverage to Everett's speech, gradually they turned attention to the president's remarks, sensing that he had delivered not merely a graceful speech but also one that “will live among the annals of man,” the Chicago Tribune asserted (Donald, p. 465). “Heartfelt” and “felicitous” were the words of other articles in the press. The Gettysburg Address soon became the signature work of Lincoln's hand. He wrote at least five autograph copies (but others may have been lost).

The speech was not without its critics and not only in the South. Newspapers backing his opponents, the Democrats, denigrated Lincoln's effort, calling it silly and dishonest. The New York World, for example, attacked Lincoln's reliance on the Declaration of Independence and his discounting of the Constitution. Other newspapers saw in Lincoln's strategy a new war aim: the securing of equality. The war was no longer exclusively one to preserve the Union. Now the causes of Union and equality seemed to be indivisible: They were one cause.

If the Gettysburg Address also impressed impartial observers, it did nothing in the short term to enhance Lincoln's prestige or his power. The Union, even after Gettysburg, had yet to achieve the major victories that would ensure the triumph of Lincoln's vision. Thus, Lincoln's prospects for reelection remained doubtful well into 1864. If Lee had been checked in his advance north, his army in Virginia still threatened the U.S. capital, and voters across the nation, even in Illinois (Lincoln's home state), did not yet seem ready to embrace equality as a war objective.

The impact of Lincoln's speech has had far greater resonance than just as a document of his presidency or even of the Civil War, however. Garry Wills, for example, has compared the greatness of the address to the greatness of the classical speeches of the Greeks. Oscar and Lilian Handlin provide a close reading of the speech in terms that would be appropriate to a poem. They note the pause Lincoln creates with the conjunction “but” at the beginning of the third paragraph, which segues from a note of “somber reassurance” to a revival of energy, expressed in phrases that excite his audience to “increased devotion” as they contemplate the soldiers' “last full measure of devotion” (Handlin and Handlin, p. 162).

Countless commentators have noted that the Gettysburg Address could have been delivered at other battlefields and that Lincoln very carefully did not anchor his remarks in current events or even in the history of the war. Instead, his highly abstract wording is moving because of the skillful use of repetition, often of the simplest words, but recited in a precise and graceful order, so that they take on the inevitability of a perfect piece of music.