Writing the Gettysburg Address: Writing the Gettysburg Address

2. The Washington Draft

t w o The Washington Draft Even with all the mysteries of the manuscripts, some things are certain. Sometime around the middle of November 1863, Abraham Lincoln sat down with a blank page of Executive Mansion letterhead paper before him, dipped his pen in ink, and wrote: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal[.]” These words are found in the first page of the so-called Nicolay copy of the Gettysburg Address; there is no disagreement today that that page is the earliest surviving page among the five copies of the speech handwritten by Lincoln, and that he wrote it in Washington before leaving for the dedication ceremony at Gettysburg.1 Beyond this, however, almost everything remains obscure about the composition process in Washington when Lincoln began to write what would later be called the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln’s writing of the speech in Washington has received remarkably little direct attention, having long been overshadowed by the scene of Lincoln at Gettysburg, speaking over the graves of the Union’s fallen heroes, an image that for more than 100 years has provided the title for innumerable books and articles, as if it was at that moment that Lincoln first com35 posed his words. The five surviving versions of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s hand each has a well-established name in the literature, and the contested history of each has been told in a variety of ways, but the text that Lincoln wrote in Washington and took with him to Gettysburg has received no such attention. This first writing, the earliest surviving element of what would become the most admired speech in American history, has not even been dignified with a name.2 A more secure understanding of Lincoln ’s speech starts with its first known version, what can be called the Washington Draft of the Gettysburg Address. In part, the relative neglect of the Washington origins of the Gettysburg Address stems from a lack of direct evidence. Unlike at Gettysburg, no one left a record of seeing Lincoln writing his speech in Washington. Yet there are four key witnesses who spoke with Lincoln about his text as it existed in Washington or who can bring their own recollections to bear on the issues : James Speed, Noah Brooks, Ward Lamon, and John G. Nicolay. Each is in some way problematic, but together their testimony reveals a nuanced , remarkably consistent, and at times surprising portrait of the Washington Draft, providing essential clues to the state of the text that Lincoln took with him on the train to Gettysburg.3 Even the account of James Speed, our most valuable guide, presents some difficulties when looking more closely at the Washington stage of the compositional narrative Lincoln described to him, particularly regarding the question of whether the speech in Washington was complete and finished . Speed recalled that Lincoln told him that after being invited he “desired to be prepared to say some appropriate thing” and that “the day before he left Washington he found time to write about half of a speech.” Eight years after first telling this story in print, Speed confirmed that Lincoln had said that “he partially wrote it before he left Washington, and finished it up after arriving in Gettysburg.”4 Together, these accounts suggest that Lincoln first seriously put pen to paper on November 17 and that the speech was only about half finished when he boarded the train for Gettysburg . Yet other eyewitnesses will show that the story, as always with the Gettysburg Address, is somewhat more complicated. To begin with, the testimony of the document itself suggests that the speech as written in Washington was far more than half finished and might possibly even have been a full and complete text, though certainly different from the speech as eventually delivered. As the guardian of the Lincoln pa36 chapter two pers, John Nicolay, who had been Lincoln’s secretary, first published in 1894 what he called “the autograph manuscript” of the Gettysburg Address , which was not known publicly up to that point and which has since come to be called the Nicolay copy of the Gettysburg Address.5 Yet the Nicolay copy of the Gettysburg Address is not the Washington Draft. The Washington Draft is the text as written in Washington...