Over the years of this newsletter, one or two of my readers have suggested that I sometimes write too long for the digital journalism age. It's true. It's also true, as was noted at the time, how succinct Abraham Lincoln was when he spoke in Gettysburg on this date in 1863.
There are a few transcriptions of the speech, with minor variations, but in none of them does Lincoln exceed 272 words. In our era of round-the-clock cable television talkfests – and Fidel Castro-length State of the Union Addresses – that seems extraordinary. It was no less extraordinary then, at a time when political orators often held the podium for hours.
Edward Everett, the keynote speaker at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, made this very point in a brief letter he dashed off to Lincoln the following day.
"Permit me also to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the Cemetery," Everett wrote.
"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. My son who parted from me at Baltimore & my daughter, concur in this sentiment."
With that introduction, here is Lincoln's speech itself, in its entirety.
Fourscore 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 battlefield 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.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
