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The Gettysburg Address

July 1-3, 1863 - The battle of Gettysburg fought in the little town of Gettysburg Pennsylvania was one of the costliest and bloodiest battles of the Civil war and is said to be the event that broke the back of the Confederacy. Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac defeated General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The battle ended Lee’s invasion of the north and left over 4500 casualties on the battlefield.

Rather than just burying the bodies where they lay, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin commissioned David Wills of Gettysburg to build a national cemetery. Most of the Confederate bodies were buried in hastily prepared field graves but by 1873 they were removed to confederate cemeteries, mainly by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

November 19, 1863 - Gettysburg Address; Abraham Lincoln’s invitation to the Gettysburg Cemetery dedication was almost an afterthought but his short message has been most historically significant. With only ten sentences and 272 words Lincoln summarized the Civil War and rededicated the nation to the war effort. Edward Everett was the featured speaker but his nearly 2-hour oration has hardly been remembered.

Scholars disagree as to its exact wording, and contemporary transcriptions published in newspaper accounts of the event and even handwritten copies by Lincoln himself differ in their wording, punctuation, and structure.

There are five known manuscript copies of the Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln gave one of these to each of his two private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay.

• Nicolay’s copy “The First Draft”is on exhibit at the Library of congress and is believed to be the earliest copy.
• The "second draft" was given to John Hay. His descendants donated both it and the Nicolay copy to the Library of Congress in 1916.
• The Illinois State Historical Library at Springfield holds a copy given to Edward Everett.
• A copy given to historian George Bancroft is at Cornell University.
• The copy kept at the Lincoln Bedroom was given to Bancroft’s Stepson, Colonel Andrew Bliss, The author of “Autumn Leaves”.

The Bliss Copy was probably the last written and is the only draft to which Lincoln affixed his signature.

Here are Lincoln's famous words:

Four score 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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not 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.

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