The Gettysburg Address Read Closely Sentence by Sentence

The most famous speech in American history was the second-best speech of the afternoon, if you went by the program. The main attraction ran about two hours. The president was the afterthought, and his remarks were over almost before the crowd had settled. That is the first lesson of the Gettysburg Address: the occasion's organizers thought they were hosting an oration, and Lincoln understood they were hosting a refounding.

Let me read it the way it ought to be read, slowly, one sentence at a time, with the Constitution and the Declaration open on the table. The text below is the Bliss copy, the fifth and last version Lincoln wrote out in his own hand, the one he signed and dated. Every word matters, and a few of them are doing more work than a hundred pages of the commentary written since.

The Afternoon of November 19, 1863

About four and a half months earlier, the armies of Lee and Meade had fought at Gettysburg on July 1, 2 and 3. The dead were still being found and reburied when Pennsylvania's agent, David Wills, organized a cemetery for the Union dead and set a dedication for November 19. This was the Soldiers' National Cemetery, and the occasion was solemn, public and, by the standards of the 1860s, a major event.

The featured speaker was Edward Everett, and the choice made sense. Everett had been a congressman, a governor of Massachusetts, a United States senator, Secretary of State and president of Harvard. He was the best-known orator in the country, and he spoke for roughly two hours, reviewing the battle and the war behind it. It was a learned performance, and it is almost entirely unread today.

Lincoln was invited to follow with "a few appropriate remarks." Notice the phrase. The president had been asked to be brief, and he took the request as a command. What he gave the crowd took about two minutes. Everett, a gracious man, wrote to Lincoln the next day. He said, in substance, that he would be glad if he could flatter himself he had come as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as the president had in two minutes. That is a paraphrase, and it is as honest a review as any speech has ever had from the man it upstaged.

Here is why the contrast matters. Everett explained the battle. Lincoln explained the country. One speech was an account of what happened in a field in Pennsylvania. The other was an account of why anyone was asked to die there, and why that reason had not expired.

Sentence One: The Date That Points to 1776

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Start with the arithmetic, because Lincoln did. A score is twenty. Four score is eighty, and eighty plus seven is eighty-seven. Subtract eighty-seven from 1863 and you land on 1776. Lincoln did not date the nation from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, or from the ratification of 1788, or from Washington's inauguration in 1789. He dated it from the Declaration of Independence.

That is not a quirk of style. It is a claim about what the country is. A nation can be founded on blood and soil, on a dynasty, or on a conquest. Lincoln says this one was founded on a proposition, a statement that can be argued, tested and defended. The proposition is in the Declaration's second paragraph: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Two words in the sentence deserve a second look. "Conceived" is the language of birth, and Lincoln stays inside that metaphor to the last line. And "our fathers" turns the audience, including the immigrants and the sons of immigrants in the ranks, into heirs. You did not have to descend from the signers. You had to accept the proposition.

The critics of the Founders have always said the proposition was a lie, since many of the men who signed it held slaves. The answer is that a promise can be broken by those who make it and still be true. Lincoln's whole argument is that the broken promise is a reason to keep the promise, not to tear it up. Frederick Douglass made the same point from the other side of the color line, and you can read that argument in What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution.

Sentence Two: A Test of Whether Self-Government Can Last

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

The second sentence turns from the past to the present, and it raises the stakes beyond the Union. The question was not only whether the United States could survive. It was whether "any nation so conceived and so dedicated" could. In 1863 almost every government on earth was a monarchy, an empire or a hereditary aristocracy. The American experiment in self-government was the exception, and the war was a live demonstration, before a watching world, of whether the exception could hold together under strain.

Look at "testing." Lincoln does not say the war is a punishment or a tragedy or an accident. He calls it a test, an experiment with a result that has not come in. The Founders had worried about exactly this. In the debates over the Constitution, the great fear was that republics were fragile and that factions would tear them apart. Madison's answer in Federalist 10 was a large republic with many interests, a design meant to keep any single faction from ruling. The Civil War was the proof that the design had a fatal flaw the Founders had left standing, and the flaw was slavery.

I would put it more bluntly than the usual commentary does. The Constitution of 1787 compromised on slavery to get a union, and the compromise ran out of road in 1861. A union that tolerates a permanent contradiction with its own first principle will eventually be asked to resolve it. For the full account of how it came to that, What Caused the Civil War, Who Won It and Why, Answered From the Record sets out the record.

Sentences Three Through Five: The Field and the Duty

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

Now the speech lands on the ground under the speaker's feet. It is plain, almost bureaucratic language, and the plainness is deliberate. "A portion of that field" is a legal description. A cemetery is a deed and a boundary. Lincoln is telling the crowd exactly what the ceremony is for before he tells them what it cannot do.

"Gave their lives that that nation might live." Read the construction slowly. The doubled "that that" is easy to stumble over, and it holds the logic: they died so that the nation conceived in sentence one, the one with the proposition, would continue to exist. The soldiers' deaths are attached to the principle, not to a flag or a region or a general.

The third sentence in this group, "It is altogether fitting and proper," is the last conventional line in the address. It is the courtesy a speaker pays to the occasion. And then, with the next word, he turns it over.

For the battle that made the field holy, Gettysburg in Three Days and the Charge That Failed on July 3, 1863 tells the three days in order.

Sentences Six and Seven: The Ground Is Already Consecrated

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

"But" is the hinge of the whole address. Lincoln has just said it is fitting to dedicate the ground. He now says the ceremony is beside the point, because the dedication was done already, by the men who fought.

Count the verbs: dedicate, consecrate, hallow. Each is stronger and more religious than the one before. The language is scriptural in rhythm, with its three-beat climb. The theological point is that holiness does not come from a clergyman's words or a politician's. It comes from sacrifice. The speaker and the audience are, in Lincoln's phrase, of "poor power."

There is a lesson here for anyone who speaks at a memorial. The living do not honor the dead by talking about themselves. "Brave men, living and dead" includes the survivors, which is a quiet and generous touch. The veterans in the crowd were being told that their blood had hallowed the field as much as the fallen's had.

Sentence Eight: The Most Famous Mistake in American Oratory

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Here is the one sentence in the speech that is plainly wrong, and its wrongness is the best thing in it. The world has long remembered what Lincoln said there. Schoolchildren still memorize it. Politicians have borrowed its cadences for a century and a half. Lincoln had underestimated, by a wide margin, the power of the words he was speaking.

But I would not call it false modesty. It is a statement of priority. Deeds outrank words. A republic is not preserved by speeches, it is preserved by people who are willing to act, and this sentence says so in the middle of a speech. If you want a rule for judging political rhetoric, take it from Lincoln: ask what the speaker is asking you to do, and whether the deed is worth the words.

Sentences Nine and Ten: The Unfinished Work

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The last two sentences are one long climb, and I would break it into its parts, because each clause is a separate commitment.

1. "Unfinished work." The Union victory at Gettysburg did not end the war, and the war's end would not finish the work either. The nation was still left with the question of slavery, which the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 had declared ended in the rebel states but which was not abolished everywhere until the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865. Lincoln is already pointing past the war.
2. "Increased devotion." Duty is not static. The dead have given a "last full measure," so the living owe more, not less.
3. "Shall not have died in vain." This is a promise to the dead, and promises to the dead are a conservative's native language. We hold that the past binds the present, and that inheritance carries obligations.
4. "This nation, under God." The phrase appears in the Bliss copy and in the Everett and Bancroft copies, though not in the two earlier drafts, the Nicolay and Hay copies. It places the republic under a judge higher than itself, which is the Declaration's own theology: rights come from a Creator, not from a legislature. A nation under God cannot claim that its government makes rights, since government is itself under judgment.
5. "A new birth of freedom." The first sentence said the nation was "conceived." The last says it must be born again. Lincoln is saying that the nation of 1776 was not finished, and that the war would deliver it. "Freedom" here means more than the end of the Union's division. It means the proposition finally applied to everyone it had always claimed to cover.
6. "Of the people, by the people, for the people." Three prepositions, three tests. Government is drawn from the people, run by them and aimed at their good. Take away any one and what remains is not self-government. A government by experts, for instance, may be for the people but is not by them. A government by popular vote that tramples a minority is by the people but not for them.

The closing phrase, "shall not perish from the earth," returns to sentence two's question. Will self-government endure? Lincoln's answer is a resolve, not a prediction.

The Strongest Objection

A fair opponent will say several things, and the best of them deserve a straight answer.

The first objection is that Lincoln rewrote the Constitution on a battlefield. The critics, from some Southern writers of the day to a good many modern scholars, argue that the Address replaced the Constitution's legal compact among states with a mystical story about a single nation and a single people, and that the Declaration was never meant to carry that weight. The objection has a respectable pedigree and has to be taken seriously.

The answer is in the text of the Constitution itself. Its preamble opens, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union." The aim, a more perfect Union, is stated in the document's first line. And the Declaration is not an ornament. It is the founding charter's statement of purpose, the reason government exists: to secure those rights. Lincoln did not impose a new reading, he returned to the one the preamble gives. The Constitution is the machinery and the Declaration is the reason for building it.

The second objection is that the war cost more than any principle was worth, since more than 600,000 soldiers are generally estimated to have died. That is a real moral weight, and Lincoln felt it. His Second Inaugural, in March 1865, takes up the question of why God allowed the carnage. But the alternative to the war was not peace. The alternative was a permanent slave power and a nation half-free, which the Declaration had already condemned. The question was whether the proposition would be honored or abandoned. A conservative who values ordered liberty, the rule of law and equal natural rights has to say the cost was awful and the cause was just.

The third objection is the cynical one: that Lincoln's words were politics, dressed up. Perhaps, in the sense that every statesman's words are politics. But the test is whether the principle survives its speaker's motives, and this one does. It has been invoked since by those who had every reason to doubt the nation's promises, and who held the nation to them anyway.

What a Close Reading Teaches

A close reading yields three lessons that are worth holding onto.

Brevity is a form of respect. The Address is about 270 words, and every one is load-bearing. Compare it with the two-hour oration it followed, which no one reads. The man who has an argument does not need an afternoon.

The Founding is a standard, not a relic. Lincoln used 1776 as a measuring stick and found the country short of it. That is exactly how a constitutional conservative uses the Founding: not as nostalgia but as a test that the present must pass. When a law or a ruling is called "settled," the right question is whether it fits the proposition. For how a young republic's leaders answered when power was at their fingertips, see George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be.

Freedom has to be re-won in every generation. The "new birth" was not a single event. The 54th Massachusetts proved it with their lives in July 1863, four months before the speech. You can read their story in The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong. And the surrender at Appomattox, eighteen months later, tested whether the victors could win the peace as well, as Appomattox and the Generous Surrender Terms That Began to Heal a Nation shows. Even the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery in a vast territory in 1787, had planted the seed that Lincoln was now harvesting, as The Northwest Ordinance Banned Slavery From a Territory Bigger Than France explains.

There is one more thing the Address teaches, and it is a joke on all of us. Lincoln said the world would little note what he said. He was wrong, and the speech has been quoted by people who would have been appalled by each other. That is the sign of a text that belongs to the whole country. Read it on the anniversary, out loud, and notice how long it takes. Two minutes. You have no excuse.

The Case in Brief

1. The Address dates the nation from 1776 and the Declaration, not from the Constitution, because the country is founded on a proposition: that all men are created equal.
2. The Civil War was a test of whether any nation so conceived could endure, and Lincoln named the war that, not an accident or a punishment.
3. The ground is consecrated by sacrifice, and the living honor the dead by finishing the work, not by speeches.
4. "A new birth of freedom" and "government of the people, by the people, for the people" are the tests every government must still pass, with "under God" placing the republic beneath a higher judge.
5. The Address is the Constitution's preamble and the Declaration's creed in ten sentences, and the right reading returns to the Founding instead of replacing it.

What you can do: read the Declaration's second paragraph and then the Address aloud, one after the other, and teach both to a child, and find the full texts on the Constitution page.