In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and on a cold November 19, he give a speech as part of the dedication ceremony for the cemetery holding the bodies of those who had died in one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
As with many well-known historical events, the details for this particular speech are a bit fuzzy. We don’t know precisely where Lincoln stood to deliver the address, although historians have tried to reconstruct the location from photographs, 3D miniatures, and geological studies of the ground. We don’t know how long it took Lincoln to deliver it, although it would have been considerably shorter than the two hour oration given by Edward Everett that preceded it.
We don’t even know the actual wording of Lincoln’s speech. There are five different manuscripts in Lincoln’s hand, given to his secretaries and the organizers of the dedication ceremony. None of these versions matches exactly the Associated Press version, which was based on the shorthand notes of the reporter who covered the event.
We do know something about the effect it had on those who heard it at the time, and on subsequent generations. Edward Everett thought it eloquent and concise, saying “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.” Other responses were not so flattering, and newspapers criticized or praised the speech depending on their political alignment, much as newspapers do today.
Over time, though, the speech gained popularity. Martin Luther King paraphrased it in his “I Have a Dream” speech. The current Constitution of France, and the 1947 Constitution of Japan contain phrases from it. And I believe that it did create an image of what government ought to be in the minds of school children who learned it by heart in the most famous version (I was among them).
An image is not a reality. Lincoln was right to call for resolution and dedication, not only to make sure that the nation he governed would be renewed to preserve a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Resolution and dedication, along with humility, are also necessary to figure out what a “government of, by, and for the people” means for each generation of Americans.