The Gettysburg Address Explained | What Made Lincoln’s Civil War Speech So Memorable?

0:00 Hello and Welcome Back to The Bill Of Rights Institute’s Primary Source Explained Video Series. I’m Kirk Higgins. And Today, After Our Long Slog Through The Federalist Papers, we’re Going To Take A Little Bit Of A Break, and We’re Going To Take A Look At Another Document From American History, one That I Always Think About this Time A Year, which Is Coming Up On The 4th of July, and That Is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. So Let’s Take A Look.

0:26 So Why Do I Think About This Speech every Year During This Time Period? Well, It’s For A Couple Of Reasons. One, Because The Anniversary Of The Battle Of Gettysburg is Coming Up. It’s July 1 To The Third. But It’s Also One Of Those Speeches that We Go Back To over And Over Again when Thinking About The 4th of July and Thinking About Our Declaration Of Independence and Sort Of What The Nation Was Built On. And My Question For US Today Is, why Do We Do That?

0:47 Why Is It That This Speech Is So Memorable? And I Think Part Of The Answer To That lies In How Carefully Abraham Lincoln Constructed The Words In His Speech and What Those Words Are Really Pointing To and How They Help US Think About The Country and What It’s Founded On. So Today, I’m Going To Take US Through and Step Through Those Lines line By Line and See If We Can Pull Out Some Of That Meeting.

1:07 But Before We Do That, I Want To Talk A Little Bit about The Historical Context. So The Picture I Have Here Is Pretty Interesting. You Can Barely, if You Move Forward and Lean In And Squint Really Closely, you Can Just See The Top of Abraham Lincoln’s Head Here, right In The Center. And It Was Taken because Abraham Lincoln at The Time Photographs took A Long Time

1:27 to Actually Take The Picture and Have It Captured The Image. While This Photographer Wasn’t Fast Enough To Get Lincoln while He Was Giving The Address, so He Actually Got Him as He’s Stepping Down Off The Stage. But Why Was Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Begin With? Well, Let’s Start With Just Talking about The American Civil War. So The American Civil War Had Started In 1861, and Now It’s November Of 1863 when

1:49 Abraham Lincoln Give This Speech, and A Lot Of Taken Place. So From December Of 1862 Until July Of 1863, things Were Not Looking Great For The Union. They Lost The Battle Of Fredericksburg, which Was Down In Fredericksburg, Virginia, after A General Named Ambrose Burnside look Them Up If You Want A Picture of some Cool Facial Hair. Failed To Cross The Rappahannock River.

2:11 It Was Defeated By The Confederate Rebels and Was Forced To Retreat Back Across The River and Suffered Tremendous Amounts Of Casualties. He Followed That Up By Doing What He Called what Came To Be Called The Mud March. It Was Sort Of An Unsuccessful Sort Of Ambling Advance to Try to cross the Rappahannock River at another place.

2:32 It was wholly unsuccessful. They weren’t able to cross the river. There was a lot of infighting amongst the generals, and the army itself really seemed like it was fraying at the edges, like this whole resistance against this rebellion could collapse, it seemed. And it was pretty dark days. I was followed up in May of 1863 with the Battle of Chancellorsville when

2:52 another general by the name of Joseph Hooker crossed the rapper Hanika was about to attack the Confederate forces around Fredericksburg when he, in fact, was attacked and defeated by those forces almost entirely. He was surprised his forces had to retreat and it was just an unmitigated disaster for the Union forces. It was after that defeat that the Confederate general, Robert E.

3:16 Lee decided that he was going to take the fight to the north and invade the north in an attempt to try to force the Union to surrender and force them to negotiate peace. This is what led to the Battle of Gettysburg in July of 1863. At the same time the Battle of Gettysburg is going on, there’s another battle in the Western Front for the town of Vicksburg. Vicksburg was a very important city on the Mississippi River that was seen as

3:40 pivotal to maintaining Southern resources and everything else. And that battle wraps up at the exact same time that Gettysburg wraps up. So you have this moment of tremendous victory and celebration all happening on July 3, the day before July 4, which obviously we all know decoration is our celebration of independence, all of it happening there.

4:02 It’s just hugely poetic moment, and it’s that moment that becomes sort of, in hindsight, certainly seen as the turning point of the war. But for those in the Union who were fighting, it was seen as a great moment. But they had no idea that this was going to be the turning point. They hoped it was. They thought it was going to be. They thought that it had potential, but they had no way of knowing what was going to unfold over the preceding years and seeing how ugly it had been up

4:24 to that point, things were still very much in the air. And so that context is important because as we’re thinking about the speech today in talking about this Battle of Gettysburg on July 1, third, and now again, it’s November 19, so it’s several months later, this adulation of victory has worn off a little bit. People are still concerned

4:45 and Abraham Lincoln is sort of embodying two different people in this. He’s Abraham Lincoln the politician, so as a political individual, he’s got a lot on his mind. He needs to keep together his coalitions of government. He has different initiatives that he wants to advance in the past. He has all that to worry about. But we’re also going to think about Lincoln the statesman. If it’s Lincoln the statesman,

5:05 that kind of crafts this speech when I’m talking about statesmanship, it’s really Lincoln’s ability to elevate the cause and to bring people into this idea, to not just convince them that this war is worth continuing to fight. But it’s also something that is attached to these higher understandings of justice that goes back to these foundational principles of what the nation was built on in the first place.

5:28 And that, I think, is where a lot of the power of this speech lies. So we’re going to take a look at that. It’s also important to remember, and I almost forgot to mention this, that there’s a presidential election coming up the following year in 1864, and it is not at all clear that Lincoln is going to be able to win that election and remain in office. Not only is it not clear, but those who are opposing him are actively talking about wanting to end

5:50 the war as quickly as possible, which could include peace with the rebel states. And that is something that Lincoln really wants to avoid. So it’s in this context, in November of 1863, that Lincoln is going to give this speech. So he starts out with these famous lines, four score, seven years ago. That four score and seven years ago is immediately going back to the 87 years

6:12 previously we had declared our independence. 87 years is not that long. It seems like a long time, I think, to us, but it’s really not that long ago in terms of history. So it just been 87 years since that declaration has been made, and he really wants to tie in the struggle that is taking place to that larger thing of the founding of the nation. And that’s where he says, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.

6:34 And then he says that that nation is conceived in liberty, meaning that conception. Sometimes we think about it in lots of different terms, but it really means that foundationally, from its origin, it was conceived in this idea of liberty. That’s what made it come together. Liberty was the thing that was at the heart of what this nation was going to be.

6:55 It is essential. And that fact that it is essential goes to what is being fought over. Now, he’s trying to couch the terms of this battle in the terms of this war as a fundamental fight over this ideal of liberty, not just legalistically, whether or not the south can secede from the Constitution, or whether or not certain legislation around slavery is or is not

7:19 constitutional, but that it’s this idea of liberty that sits not only at the heart of our nation, but at the heart of the struggle. He says not only was the nation conceded in liberty, but it was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Proposition is a really interesting word for Lincoln to choose here, because he’s not saying that all men are created equal, full stop.

7:40 He’s saying that it was dedicated to this idea, this possibility. And this propositional language is one that we probably saw a little bit of in the Federalist Papers. But it’s the idea. Proposition is something that can be tested, it can be proven, but it is yet to be proven. It is something that we’re asserting and that we need to prove it. And what he’s alluding to here is that every generation needs to continue to fight to prove that we are all equal.

8:04 And by all equal, he’s saying equal in every sense of the term, equal before the law from a legalistic standpoint, but also equal in our voice and our sovereignty and our ability to vote and affect the course of government. And what he’s saying is that that proposition sits at the heart again of this conflict and it’s that proposition that is being fought over.

8:25 So if that last paragraph is setting up sort of the moment, what moment we’re in now, we can really want to narrow in on the context. So here we are coming together on this day, 87 years hence from the nation’s founding, and now today we’re gathering in the midst of this great civil war. It’s important that he called it a civil

8:46 war because what he’s saying is that this is a conflict amongst ourselves. We’ve all been dedicated and we’ve created as this nation is one thing and now we’re in this great civil war. And it’s that civil war that is, again, this proposition idea. It is testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

9:07 This is the idea like canon nation like this exists. There are many critics, as we saw some of those critics even in the Anti-Federalist, that were concerned about what it’s going to mean to form a government, a self-government around this Constitution that we do have in this sense. There are many during the American Revolution that thought, oh, it’s not possible to have a democratic

9:27 government, small, d democratic government exist for a long time. You can’t have people self governed. You need the older version would go, you need some sort of aristocratic class or some sort of monarch that can oversee and direct the people. Leaving it up to self-government is just going to fall apart. And this is what the founders came together and said, no, we are going to found a nation on that.

9:50 And this is what Lincoln is saying is being tested. And so here he’s taking this context of the Civil War and again connecting it to this higher ideal. So he’s making a case for why this war needs to exist. That’s the political side. But again, he’s elevating it and saying it’s not just about the legal things that we’re fighting over, but it’s about these bigger, larger issues. It’s about fundamentally the nature of what the United States is going to be.

10:13 So now he’s going to get even more specific. He’s going to take down the exact event that they are gathered here for. And that event is a dedication of a national cemetery. So after the Battle of Gettysburg, the state of Pennsylvania decided that it would dedicate a cemetery that was going to be funded by the various states who had sent troops to the Battle of Gettysburg. And so this is the dedication of this

10:33 national cemetery here in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And so they brought together this for this dedication moment. They’re dedicating the cemetery. So they said on the program that’s what it was going to be. And Lincoln’s going to take that idea of dedication and sort of build on it again to touch on these higher principle ideas.

10:54 Because we were met on a great battlefield of that war, we have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those that here gave their lives, that that nation might live. And it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. So he’s saying, look, it’s proper that we’re coming together to dedicate this new cemetery in honor of those who gave their lives.

11:14 But now he’s going to take it one step further. And here Lincoln is really being rhetorical. By rhetorical, I mean he’s using his words to sort of build an image up for the audience and again elevate them from seeing what’s exactly in front of them to seeing these higher things to try to bring them into the idea that this war that’s being fought is

11:35 for so much more than just immediate political ends or the immediate sort of forcing of states to prevent them from succeeding. He’s tying it into sort of these eternal principles, these eternal ideas in making it about so much more than just simply a political fight over whether or not something is or is not constitutional.

11:58 And he’s doing this in the context of a country that sees oration meaning speaking as sort of a pastime, a fascinating bite. It’s a very spoken time. It’s one of the reasons. So Edward Everett gave speech immediately before Lincoln. He spoke for 2 hours, if you can believe that, sitting there for 2 hours listening to a speech.

12:19 And that wasn’t uncommon. Those speeches will go for a long time. People were really listening closely to what was being said. They were people that liked this poetic language. It was very enmeshed in their culture. This is some of this language. Some historians will look at the Gettysburg Address and say it comes from the King James Bible, which was a Bible that was written to be read aloud originally in sort of a way

12:42 that is poetic and sort of conjuring up these images with beautiful words. And Lincoln is really a person of that culture. And so that’s where some of this is coming from. And when he’s talking here again, he’s using this rhetoric to elevate what this battle is about. To place it in the minds of people at this momentous moment, but not only this momentous moment,

13:03 but also pointing to the sacrifice of the individuals who fought there as a part of this larger battle that’s being fought for these foundational ideas. And that’s what he says here. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hollow this ground. He was using that sort of literary triplet to really draw you in and say that, look,

13:24 we’re here to dedicate this thing, but we can’t. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated far above our poor power to add in the track the world will little note no longer remember what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. I’m just going to highlight that. So obviously we’re still talking about this.

13:45 It’s a memorable speech. So do we little note what they said here? I don’t know that that’s the point. I do think it’s a fun thing to point out, that you can point out the Gettysburg Address, say, well, Lincoln was wrong, we definitely remember. But what he’s saying is that they may not note or long remember it, but they cannot forget what they did here because it’s that sacrifice to this higher goal that is the thing that is most important.

14:11 These individuals who are gathered here to dedicate the cemetery, they can come and they can speak and they can talk about it and they can remember those individuals in that moment. But that dedication is not the true dedication. The true dedication was those who sacrificed their lives for this higher cause of saving the government that was conceived in liberty and dedicated to that proposition that all men were created equal.

14:33 So Lincoln then uses that to pivot towards this conclusion and here is his call to action. So if that was elevating the moment, this is then the final call to action for what he wants his audience to do when they leave. He says it is rather for us the living. And he’s saying rather here because it’s not their job to dedicate the cemetery. That’s great and it’s good that they’re

14:54 doing that and it’s proper that they’re doing that. But what they really need to do is to dedicate here to the unfinished work which they who have fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. So what they really need to do is dedicate themselves to the cause that this union is fighting for, to defeat these rebellious states and to preserve this idea of government that this union stands for.

15:21 He uses this beautiful poetic language. It’s rather for us here to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honor dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, meaning they gave their last everything that they had to this cause of this.

15:41 Again, this idea, this government that was conceived in liberty, dedicated that proposition that all are created equal, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, and that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. And that new birth of freedom can be an allusion to the Emancipation Proclamation, that we’re getting rid of this original sin of state slavery.

16:03 We’re truly living up to this ideal that all are created equal, that we’re having this new birth of freedom, that we are now pursuing this goal in this country that’s conceived in liberty as truly as we possibly can. He says that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

16:25 And that final phrase has become so enmeshed in our own popular culture. If you’ve heard the Gettysburg Address, you probably know four score and seven years ago, and you probably know of the people, by the people, for the people. And again, it’s this idea that government that is directly that equality that he was talking about in the beginning is truly about our own sovereignty

16:48 and the recognition of the government that we are all equal and that we all have an equal voice and an equal say in how that government directs itself. And that’s where Lincoln’s wanting to point this entire audience. So I hope you all enjoyed that sort of walking through line by line. If we go back to this big question, why is the Gettysburg Address so memorable? I think it comes down to a lot of things that were pointed out there,

17:08 but I think it’s in no small part due to the fact that Lincoln was so successful in creating this vision for what the war was being fought for, and what that battle, in particular, what Gettysburg meant to the nation, in these words that were just incredibly powerful. He really elevated the moment. He really made it seem as though that the struggle that was fought

17:30 at Gettysburg encapsulated, in many ways, the struggle that the war was about. It also obviously helps with the Union won. So that meant that this became the moment, this became the idea that the war was sort of encapsulated about, and that’s the winning side, which is important. It’s also just a beautiful way in which it

17:52 was written, I think, is another thing that really stands out. It doesn’t read like a normal book when they pick up, but it really reads something that is elevated, that is powerful, and that is carefully written and carefully constructed, where every word is meant to be thought about and sort of chewed on. And that’s, I think, a really powerful thing.

18:13 So thank you all again for joining me. I hope you enjoyed kind of unpacking the Gettysburg Address as always. If you have any comments or want to reach out or see us cover a document, please comment down below or get in touch with us on all the social medias, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. Also check out the other shows that we have. My colleague Tony Williams actually had a conversation with a scholar on a scholar talk series where they go into sort

18:39 of Lincoln statesmanship and talk about how it is that Lincoln sort of crafts public opinion and thinks about some of these big, pivotal moments. You can also check out my colleague Mary Patterson’s work, and she looks at a bunch of different visual primary sources and unpacks, those are also a lot of fun. So thank you again for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.