There is something democratic, in the broadest sense, about Lincoln’s choice of plain-spoken words and to-the-point sentences.
Instead, he wanted to address people directly and simply, in plain language that would be immediately accessible and comprehensible to everyone. This is partly because Lincoln eschewed the high-flown allusions and wordy style of most political orators of the nineteenth century. His speech lasted perhaps two minutes, contrasted with Everett’s two hours.Īfterwards, Lincoln remarked that he had ‘failed’ in his duty to deliver a memorable speech, and some contemporary newspaper reports echoed this judgment, with the Chicago Times summarising it as a few ‘silly, flat and dishwatery utterances’ before hinting that Lincoln’s speech was an embarrassment, especially coming from so high an office as the President of the United States.īut in time, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address would come to be regarded as one of the great historic American speeches. Lincoln’s speech is just 268 words long, because he was intended just to wrap things up with a few concluding remarks. When he’d finished, his exhausted audience of some 15,000 people waited for their President to address them. Everett’s speech was packed full of literary and historical allusions which were, one feels, there to remind his listeners how learned Everett was.
For example, on the day Lincoln delivered his famous address, he was not the top billing: the main speaker at Gettysburg on 19 November 1863 was not Abraham Lincoln but Edward Everett.Įverett gave a long – many would say overlong – speech, which lasted two hours. The mythical aura surrounding the Gettysburg Address, like many iconic moments in American history, tends to obscure some of the more surprising facts from us. He ends with a now-famous phrase (‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’) which evokes the principle of democracy, whereby nations are governed by elected officials and everyone has a say in who runs the country. Lincoln concludes his address by urging his listeners to keep up the fight, so that the men who have died in battles such as the Battle of Gettysburg will not have given their lives in vain to a lost cause. 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. 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.
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