Abraham Lincoln’s legendary Gettysburg Address promised “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

On November 19, 1863, near the site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln provided a brief but groundbreaking vision of the past and promise of the United States in a speech known as the Address Gettysburg.

The short speech – just 272 words arranged in ten sentences – was part of an inauguration ceremony of a new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to honor the thousands of Union soldiers who died during the battle of July 1863. Before the President took the stand, bands played, ministers offered prayers, and prayers Edward Everett, a well-known lecturer and politician, gave a speech of 13,000 words orationloaded with references to Greek antiquity, which lasted more than two hours.

When it was Lincoln’s turn to speak, it only lasted about two minutes. But the impact of the speech, exemplified by its oft-recited opening line – “Four twenty 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” – has lasted over a century.

Compared to the overtly classical content and tone of Everett’s speech, which was intended to elevate the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War to epic status, Lincoln’s words and message were spare and modest. “The brave men, living and dead, who fought (on this battlefield),” Lincoln said, “have consecrated it, far beyond our limited power to add or subtract.” The cemetery, the Battle of Gettysburg, the contradictions of the United States and the ideals of the United States Declaration of Independence were far more important than he could express in words.

The Gettysburg Speech: The Two-Minute Speech That Saved America

Lincoln spoke of the country’s struggle in “a great civil war” that will test democracy’s ability to survive. His goal was to promote a deeper resolve among his listeners – not just to honor the dead, but to continue to fight their battles and defend the ideals they were charged with protecting. As such, he promised “that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of liberty, and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish to go. the earth.”

In his eulogy for Lincoln two years later, Charles Sumnera Massachusetts senator and leading abolitionist, praised the Gettysburg speech as “a monumental act,” made even more poignant by Lincoln’s murder just after the end of the Civil War in April 1865.

Responding to Lincoln’s modest assertion in the speech that “the world will little notice, nor long remember what we here say,” Sumner thought the late president was gravely mistaken. “The world immediately noticed what he said, and will never cease to remember it,” Sumner praised. He was right: Although only 15,000 people are thought to have heard Lincoln speak that day, the speech has since become a touchstone of American rhetoric.