lincoln delivered the gettysburg address

Opposition newspapers ridiculed those words. If you look at the verbs of the first sentence - ‘brought forth,’ ‘conceive,’ ‘dedicate’ - those are all words that describe the birth and baptism of a child. Why are the first words so frequently quoted? The main distinction that matters in the speech is that between the living and the dead, not that between the North and the South. He did not define the war as a crusade against slave owners. He defined the war in a remarkably unvitriolic way - as a war that tests whether any nation dedicated to equality can endure slavery. It would require the nation to live up to the tenets of the Constitution we had never lived up to - namely, that all men are created equal.

The speech called not just for military victory but also for a new birth of freedom. Lincoln’s address tied the suffering of the soldiers who had died, and the civilians who had lost their families, to a sense of the meaning of American democracy. Typically, a wartime elegy says, in so many words, ‘These people died, don’t let their death be in vain.’ It’s easy for that to sound inauthentic. It’s very easy for a wartime elegy to be inauthentic, particularly when it’s given by a political figure, because one of the tasks of wartime elegy is to motivate soldiers to continue the war, even in the face of great bloodshed. What makes the Gettysburg Address so famous? It was a very good speech with good points, but it wasn’t 300 words. It isn’t true that Everett’s speech was boring. Senator Edward Everett himself, who gave a two-hour speech before Lincoln’s, understood that the speech was good and wrote Lincoln telling him so. It is true the applause following the speech was a bit scattered people did not expect the speech to be so short, and the audience was taken by surprise. But Lincoln thought most things he did were a failure, so that’s not a good way to judge. We think the speech was a failure because Lincoln thought so. It’s also not true that the speech was a complete failure. It was the fruit of a great deal of thought and issues that he’d been thinking about over a lifetime. It’s not true that Lincoln wrote it on the train to Pennsylvania from Washington, D.C. What are some of the greatest misconceptions about the Gettysburg Address?

BrandeisNOW spoke with English professor John Burt, author of the critically acclaimed “Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism,” about the meaning of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln addressed an audience of about 15,000 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery four months after the Union defeated the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. One hundred fifty years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a two-minute speech that became one of the most cherished in American history.

Lincoln delivered the gettysburg address