Writing the Gettysburg Address: Writing the Gettysburg Address

8. "My Remarks at Gettysburg"

c h a p t e r e i g h t “My Remarks at Gettysburg” Just as each person experienced the moment of Lincoln at Gettysburg in unique ways, so too did everyone hear a different speech. Over time, the sheer number of different versions of Lincoln’s speech in circulation would be a key part of the myth—the question of what exactly he said and wrote adding another theme to the mysteries of the manuscripts. Still, upon three secure pillars we can reconstruct Lincoln’s speech in all its complexity: the delivery text, the spoken words, and Lincoln’s final revision that he wrote after the speech when preparing his words for publication. In the spaces between these three differing versions we can best approach Lincoln’s final moments of composition, the creative performance and reading of what Lincoln referred to in a letter to Everett as “my remarks at Gettysburg.”1 With a secure delivery text established, the first task is to determine which of the early reports of Lincoln’s spoken words, virtually all of them from newspapers, are independent or reliable guides and which are merely corrupted copies of each other, because telegraphic variations in transmitting one text can create the appearance of distinct reports of Lincoln’s spoken words. Not only did the telegraph require transcription into Morse code and back to words, introducing potential human error, but weather, insulation, distance, the adjustments of the sending and receiving apparatuses , and many other elements affected the accuracy of transmission. On November 20, when Lincoln’s speech was first published, there were al201 ready quite literally as many versions of Lincoln’s remarks in circulation as there were newspapers that printed them. Newspaper readers of the midnineteenth century accepted some variations in wording as unavoidable, the inaccuracies of telegraphic communications being one of the running jokes of the time.2 The versions in the Washington Daily Morning Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune have each been held up as possibly independent texts, for example, but both turn out to be variations of the standard Associated Press (AP) version of Lincoln’s words that other papers published. That each mile along the telegraph line introduced new errors can be seen by comparing Lincoln’s words as printed on November 21 in papers at different distances from Gettysburg, in this case, the Chicago Tribune (ChiTb21) and the Pittsburgh Gazette (PitGz21), both of which were printing the version of the AP report that was sent to the Western Presses association of newspapers beyond the Appalachians:3 PitGz21: are created equal. [“Good, good,” and applause.] Now we ChiTb21: are created equal by a good God, and [applause] now we One version has Lincoln invoking the authority of the Almighty to uphold the declaration of human equality; the other reports the shouts of a crowd. In the East, newspapers almost exclusively published the AP version of Lincoln’s speech, but with the inevitable telegraphic variations, each city’s version of Lincoln’s speech has its own genetic code, marked in most cases by unique combinations of mutations. The New York Tribune version has generally been considered the best AP report of Lincoln’s spoken words, following a commonsense understanding of how the AP system worked, because most AP stories were sent from the central New York offices; reports that originated elsewhere would be sent to New York for distribution . However, when AP reports were sent to New York, they would also be picked up by newspapers that happened to be situated on telegraph lines along the way. Philadelphia papers, for example, would not wait for news from Washington to reach New York and then be redistributed but would access the messages as they came north out of the capital.4 This standard practice was followed in the case of the Gettysburg ceremony, as attested by the changes in the AP text as it traveled outward from Gettysburg . For example, the “poor” in “our poor power” in Lincoln’s written 202 chapter eight delivery text is found in newspaper reports beyond the Appalachians and south of New York but is not found in New York papers or to the north. Such evidence shows that the long-dominant New York AP version is merely another variant of the text as telegraphed from Gettysburg. Fortunately, because telegraphic variations behave like mutations in DNA, with earlier changes being repeated by later copies, it...