Writing the Gettysburg Address: Writing the Gettysburg Address

Photo Gallery

1. Lincoln in his White House office, the “Backwoods Jupiter,” as John Hay once described him, standing at the center of the Civil War. He later told his friend James Speed that after receiving the invitation to Gettysburg, he was “uncertain whether his duties would not detain him at Washington—but was anxious to go—and desired to be prepared to say some appropriate thing.” (Keya Morgan Collection, LincolnImages.com) 2. Lincoln asked the cemetery designer, William Saunders, to bring the plan of the cemetery to the White House on November 17, 1863, the night before he left for Gettysburg. It was probably just after their close examination on Lincoln’s office table of the large, beautifully colored plan and their discussion of the ideals behind the cemetery that Lincoln completed the speech that he took with him on the train the next day, the Washington Draft of the Gettysburg Address. (Report of the Select Committee) 3. The Letterhead Page, written in Washington, D.C., probably the night of November 17, as the first page of the Washington Draft of Lincoln’s speech. This page and its revisions in Gettysburg, including the phrase underlined in pencil evoking “what they did here,” encodes the evidence for Lincoln’s emotional and intellectual journey to the “new birth of freedom.” (Library of Congress) 4. This photograph from about 1890 shows David Wills and the Wills family home, where Lincoln stayed in Gettysburg. After arriving on November 18, Lincoln had dinner and then spoke briefly to a celebratory crowd from the front door steps. He then worked on his speech for about an hour in his room (whose two windows are visible on the right above the side door), but then at about eleven o’clock he made an unanticipated visit to the house shown here immediately to the right of the Wills home to show his speech to Secretary of State Seward. Back at the Wills house by about midnight, Lincoln finished what he thought would be the speech he would give the next day. (Adams County Historical Society) 5. The Pencil Page, the second page of the Battlefield Draft that Lincoln held while speaking. After visiting the battlefield on the morning of November 19, Lincoln unexpectedly revised what must have been a completed speech by editing the Letterhead Page in pencil and adding this new second page, “but concluded it so shortly before it was to be delivered,” he told James Speed, that “he had not time to memorize it.” This is the first known appearance of the phrase “a new birth of freedom.” (Library of Congress) 6. With the Battlefield Draft folded in his pocket, Lincoln and the other dignitaries rode on horseback in the procession to the cemetery just behind the military honor guard, shown in this photograph by the Tyson brothers, as it came south down Baltimore Turnpike from the main square. Just beyond the waiting crowd the procession turned slightly to its right to eventually enter the cemetery from the west. “The mighty mass rolled on as the waves of the mighty ocean,” wrote one observer. (Library of Congress) 7. Taken on the day of the ceremony, according to photographer Peter Weaver, this photograph shows the speakers’ stand just to the right of the flagpole and slightly over the crest of the hill. From this perspective, Lincoln and the procession would enter the scene from the left along the sunken Taneytown Road and then turn southeast up the central axis of the cemetery between the newly dug graves, visible here as arcs across the hillside. (Hanover Area Historical Society) 8. Alexander Gardner aligned this photograph on the gatehouse of the town cemetery and almost perpendicular to the front of the speakers’ platform, with Edward Everett’s tent behind. From this vantage point, the speakers would be facing away and to the left, addressing the main body of the crowd around and beyond the flagpole. Although the ceremony had been under way some time when this photograph was taken, the soldiers in the foreground still outline the space reserved for the participants in the procession. It has been claimed that Lincoln can be seen here mounted on horseback in the middle distance, but he is instead on the platform, hidden from view. (Library...