19 November: The Gettysburg Address

On this date in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the famous Gettysburg Address. 10 things you might not know about it:

1. Why was Lincoln making a speech that day at all? He had been asked to speak at the dedication ceremony of a new national cemetery in a town called Gettysburg. About six months before, the Union had triumphed over Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces at the Battle of Gettysburg—often considered the turning point of the Civil War, but there had been heavy losses on both sides, many of them buried in temporary battlefield graves. The new cemetery was to be their final resting place. Committee leader David Mills invited Abraham Lincoln to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” at the dedication ceremony.
2. Abraham Lincoln's wasn't the main speech at the event. The keynote speaker was actually Edward Everett, a former Harvard president, U.S. congressman and governor of Massachusetts, and Millard Fillmore’s secretary of state. He spoke for two hours compared to Lincoln's two minutes. His speech was 13,607 words long compared to Lincoln's 272.
3. Everett was, nonetheless, full of admiration for Lincoln's speech. In fact he wrote to him the next day and said: “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.”
4. Lincoln himself had doubts about his speech: his reply to Everett was that he was pleased to know that his speech hadn't been a total failure.
5. Not everyone was as impressed. The newspapers of the time published reviews that weren't exactly glowing. Pennsylvania’s Daily Patriot and Union dismissed the speech as “silly remarks” and The Chicago Times said: “the cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly flat dishwatery utterances of a man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the president of the United States.” In Britain, The Times commented, the ceremony “was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”
6. According to legend, Lincoln composed the speech on the back of an Envelope on the train journey to Gettysburg, although there is evidence that wasn't the case. One of the early copies was written on official White House stationery, which suggests that Lincoln drafted his speech before leaving home and added finishing touches it the night before. Historians have furthermore noted that the drafts were written in neat, even handwriting, which would have been impossible to achieve on a moving train. However, Harriet Beecher Stowe insisted at the time that the speech had taken "only a few moments" to compose and industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who claimed to have lent Lincoln a pen with which to scrawl on the back of an envelope.
7. Lincoln was suffering from the onset of smallpox when he delivered the speech. He'd complained of feeling weak on the train journey and dizzy on the morning of the speech. On his return, he became quite ill with a high fever, headaches, backaches, and scarlet blisters all over his skin. Modern doctors have suggested that he had smallpox and was lucky to survive, but he recovered and resumed his regular presidential duties three weeks later.
8. While the dedication ceremony was in progress, and presumably during Lincoln's speech, some of the dead from the battle were being buried nearby.
9. There are five manuscript copies of the speech in existence. Lincoln wrote out a couple for his private secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, for safe keeping. These are both housed in the Library of Congress. Sometime later, Lincoln made three more copies. One was for Everett, which is now kept at the Illinois State Historical Library; another, now at Cornell University, was requested by historian George Bancroft; and a third, for Bancroft’s stepson, Colonel Alexander Bliss, is now kept in the Lincoln Room of the White House. The five copies are all slightly different, so there is disagreement about which is the most accurate. Some people think the most accurate version is the Associated Press transcription from the actual event.
10. The famous phrase, "government of the people, by the people, for the people" comes from this speech, as Lincoln declared that such a government "shall not perish from the earth." Today, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has as its ship's motto the phrase "shall not perish".

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