Writing the Gettysburg Address: Writing the Gettysburg Address

Introduction: The Mysteries of the Manuscripts

Introduction: The Mysteries of the Manuscripts A brilliant November day. Ten thousand mourners wait. He rises. The throng of eager listeners was swayed by his stirring words. Their hearts swelled with deeper emotions as the speaker poured out the fervor of his own patriotic soul, always in full sympathy with the brave defenders of the country, over the nameless graves which consecrated that field of blood. “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.” Noble words of a true-hearted patriot! Such honor to the brave does not often hallow their sleeping dust. . . . His generous nature clasped the lifeless forms of those who saved their country by nobly sacrificing themselves; and he would recognize the obligations of the living to the martyred dead.1 Lincoln at Gettysburg. Few images of the American past run deeper in the national memory than that of the tall martyr president dedicating the cemetery for the honored dead of the greatest battle of the Civil War. But in our postheroic era, depictions like this one, published by William Makepeace Thayer less than a year after the ceremony—even before Lincoln was reelected—seem irretrievably remote. It may be that the iconic scenes and 1 well-worn passages of this story have been told and retold so many times that the tale has changed from vividly classic to hopelessly archaic, any semblance of vitality lost beneath tradition, homily, and trivia.2 Controversy and debate have swirled around what exactly Lincoln said, what he wore, what he meant, the response of the crowd, the color of his horse, whether he wrote on the train, and a myriad of other matters. As early as 1906 a beleaguered book reviewer expressed only half-joking surprise that “so minor an incident as the delivery of an address, strictly occasional, by a man who was not a noted orator” should inspire three books in that year alone. Forty years later, James G. Randall, one of the first academic historians to specialize in Lincoln and the war, bemoaned “the unprofitable realm of Lincoln-at-Gettysburg apocrypha.”3 No area of that realm has been more unprofitable than the quest to know how Lincoln wrote and revised the Gettysburg Address. Some of the first newspaper articles about the Gettysburg dedication ceremony, 150 years ago, noted that Lincoln’s words were reported inaccurately, and the 1870s saw the first debate about which of the handwritten copies of the speech he may have held while speaking; to the present these questions have remained unanswered. These mysteries of the manuscripts are important because the search for a secure history of Lincoln’s best-known speech is at heart an effort to understand his ideas and purposes at a crucial moment in the war, for there is no more effective way to enter into people’s thinking than to look over their shoulder as they compose and revise. It is in the spaces between words, in the differences and choices made between one sentence or phrase and another, that we approach most closely the enigma of creativity and thought. Yet for the Gettysburg Address, confusion and uncertainty about such fundamental issues as which of the five handwritten versions Lincoln wrote first, which manuscript was the one— if any—he read from at the ceremony, and which report of his words is most reliable have prevented comprehensive analysis of Lincoln’s vision and a clear sense of the evolution of his thought as he wrote and spoke about the central issues of the great Civil War and the nature of the American experiment. Many of the mysteries of the manuscripts arise because, although the Gettysburg Address is the most admired work by our most admired president , the dramatic and surprising story of Lincoln’s speech has never been fully told.4 For Lincoln, getting to the speech—as a statement of ideas and as an event—was both an intellectual and a physical journey. Lincoln be2 introduction gan to compose his words in Washington with one set of ideas, incorporated in the draft of the speech that he took with him when he left the White House. Yet by the time Lincoln stood on the platform at Gettysburg a day later, he had traveled a long road, one that had become more meaningful with each step. He had journeyed by carriage, train, and...