On this day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a short and stirring address, now known as the Gettysburg Address, at the dedication of a military cemetery in a Pennsylvania town that had just months before been the site of a historic, and historically violent, Civil War battle. The speech was Lincoln’s attempt to reinvigorate waning public sentiment behind the war effort, and it worked. But ironically, Lincoln wasn’t even the headliner of the ceremony.
Gettysburg had been the site of a battle four months earlier that ended up proving the deadliest of the war. Over 45,000 men were either killed, injured, captured, or went missing over the three days of combat. The headliner, a then well-known public speaker named Edward Everett, gave remarks that lasted a whole two hours. Lincoln’s speech, by contrast, ran for around two minutes. It was just 275 words long—for reference, that’s just a few words longer than this off-script!
It was Lincoln’s address that would go down in U.S. history. His key point was that painful, personal sacrifices were needed to bring the Civil War to a close and to maintain the country as one “conceived in Liberty.” The message was tailored to a public that was increasingly concerned with ending, not winning, the war. Helping his argument was the result of the Battle of Gettysburg. Gen. Robert E. Lee had been sent running after a failed attempt to take the area, beginning the Confederate military’s collapse that would eventually end the war.
You can see the three-paragraph speech on the website of the National Constitution Center.
