The Writing of a Great Address. By Peggy Noonan.

Cemetery Ridge at sunset. This monument overlooking the valley of Pickett’s Charge, represents Union soldiers using their rifles as clubs after running out of bullets. John Ferebee.

The Writing of a Great Address. By Peggy Noonan. Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2013.

Lincoln began forming his thoughts just after the Battle of Gettysburg.

Gettysburg and the Eternal Battle for a “New Birth of Freedom.” By Allen C. Guelzo. Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2013.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. By John G. Nicolay. The Century, February 1894. Also here and here.

Address of Hon. Edward Everett, at the consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, 19th November, 1863 : with the dedicatory speech of President Lincoln, and the other exercises of the occasion. By Edward Everett et al. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1864.

Response to a Serenade, July 7, 1863. By Abraham Lincoln. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. A preview of the Gettysburg Address.


Noonan:

The air is full of the Battle of Gettysburg, whose 150th anniversary this week marked. Those who love history are thinking about Little Round Top and Devil’s Den, Culp’s Hill and the Peach Orchard, and all the valor and mistakes of men at war. The mystery of them, too. How did Joshua Chamberlain, a bookish young professor of rhetoric from Maine, turn into a steely-eyed warrior of the most extraordinary grit and guts at the exact moment those qualities were most needed? He was a living hinge of history. Why did Robert E. Lee, that military master who always knew when not to push it too far, push it too far and order Pickett to charge that open field?

 

At Gettysburg, great deeds were followed by great words. The battle won the war—it was the turning point—and a speech named the war’s meaning. We will mark the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address this fall.

 

What do we know of its writing? Still pretty much what John Nicolay told us in 1894, 31 years later. In an essay in The Century, a quarterly, Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s two private secretaries, sought to put to rest some myths.

 

On Nov. 19, 1863, President Lincoln would speak at the dedication of the new national cemetery. He had been invited just over two weeks before, so he wouldn’t have long to prepare his remarks. And he was busy with other things—a report to Congress, the day-to-day of the war.

 

“There is no record of when Mr. Lincoln wrote the first sentences of his proposed address,” wrote Nicolay. “He probably followed his usual habit in such matters, using great deliberation in arranging his thoughts, and molding his phrases mentally, waiting to reduce them to writing until they had taken satisfactory form.”

 

This is a somewhat unusual way to write an important document. It’s how Samuel Johnson often wrote his essays, getting it right in his head and then committing it, almost fully formed, to paper. From my observation, writers of speeches tend to jot down thoughts, ideas and bits of language and then compose, draft after draft, from the notes. I asked a friend, a writer and artist, if he knew of another writer who wrote as Lincoln and Johnson did. “No, but I know of a great composer who seems to have done exactly that—Mozart.”

 

Lincoln travelled to Gettysburg by train, arriving near sundown the night before the speech. In his pocket, not his hat, he carried an almost-finished draft, written in ink on Executive Office stationery. He didn’t write any of the speech on the trip—there was too much bustle around him, and the train jerked too much.

 

That night in Gettysburg, Lincoln stayed in the home of David Wills, a local “eminento” who’d pushed the idea of the national cemetery and helped buy the land. The little town was overrun with visitors. A crowd gathered at Wills’s house and called out to Lincoln to speak.

 

Here we see a nice moment of the egalitarianism and lack of reverence with which 19th-century Americans approached their presidents.

 

Lincoln came out and said: “I appear before you . . . merely to thank you for the compliment.” He would not deliver a speech for “several substantial reasons.” One is that he didn’t have one. “In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things,” he added.

 

“If you can help it,” shot a voice from the crowd.

 

Lincoln said the only way to help it was to say “nothing at all.”

 

The next morning, Nicolay joined Lincoln upstairs and stayed for about an hour as the president, with lead pencil, finished the speech.

 

Days before, Lincoln had told the reporter Noah Brooks that the address would be “short, short, short.” He wasn’t the main speaker of the day; that was the famous orator Edward Everett, who spoke at noon, for two hours.

 

From Lincoln the crowd expected something quick, maybe pithy, possibly perfunctory. “They were therefore totally unprepared for what they heard,” Nicolay recalled, “and could not immediately realize that his words, and not those of the carefully selected orator, were to carry the concentrated thought of the occasion like a trumpet-peal to furthest posterity.”

 

Nicolay sat a few feet from Lincoln. “It is the distinct recollection of the writer . . . that he did not read from the written pages,” that there was nothing “mechanical” in his delivery. He spoke instead from “the fullness and conciseness of thought and memory.”

 

In the end there were three versions of the speech, all the same in meaning but with small stylistic differences.

 

There was the draft Lincoln wrote in Washington and finished in Gettysburg. There is the version taken down in shorthand by an Associated Press reporter as the president spoke—this would be telegraphed across the country and splashed on the next morning’s front pages. And there is the revised copy Lincoln made after his return to the White House. He compared his original draft with the version in”the newspapers and included “his own recollections of the exact form in which he delivered" the speech. That draft is now the official, agreed-upon text.

 

More from Allen Guelzo’s new “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” a sweeping and meticulous recounting of the battle that never loses sight of its essentials. Mr. Guelzo, in an epilogue, says something about the Gettysburg Address I’d not seen noted in a life reading Lincoln.

 

It turns out Lincoln gave a kind of preview of the address only three days after the battle had ended. It was July 7. Word had reached the War Department of another Union triumph, on July 4, at Vicksburg, Miss. This greatly cheered a glum Lincoln, who'd been grieving Gen. George Meade’s decision not to follow and crush Lee’s forces as they retreated from Pennsylvania. What happened at Vicksburg underscored the momentum toward victory. Lincoln called the news “great. . . . It is great!”

 

Word swept through Washington. A crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and called for a speech.

 

Lincoln improvised from a second-floor window. Actually he rambled, but you can see where even then he was going. Guelzo puts Lincoln’s remarks in italics: “How long ago is it? . . . eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” The victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, he said, had put the opponents of that truth on the run.

 

This, Lincoln said, was “a glorious theme,” but he was not prepared, at that moment, to do it justice.

 

He would, however, in the next two weeks, as he thought, and formulated, and decided exactly how he wanted to say what he wanted to say.

 

“How long ago is it—eighty odd years?’ would become, “Four score and seven years ago.” Less dry and numeric, that. Almost biblical, as if the events of 1776 were epochal in the history of man.

 

Which is what he thought.

 

And he was right.

 

Happy 237th Independence Day to America, the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.


Guelzo:

Among my great-grandfather’s papers, carefully set down in his small, gnarled handwriting, is a copy of the Gettysburg Address. When Lincoln delivered the speech, my great-grandfather was 10 years old and living in Sweden, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat. That inconvenient birth exposed him to the haphazardness of privilege—for although he was raised, petted and groomed by his father’s family, he soon understood that he would never have any real standing in that family or their world.

Over their protests, he left Sweden in his 20s, arriving penniless in New York in 1879 but still in possession of the American president’s words, the promise of a new nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, where no one—not even a baron's bastard—was obliged to remove his cap when his betters rode by.

For John Anderson (the name he assumed when he moved to Philadelphia in the 1880s), the Gettysburg Address was the title-deed to his new world. Little did he realize how very narrowly that deed had come to being lost.

The Civil War was in its third year when Abraham Lincoln was invited to deliver his “few appropriate remarks” at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. For most of those three years, the war had not gone well for the Union he had been elected to lead as president. A breakaway Confederacy of 11 Southern states had seceded, playing on their declared right to self-determination and fighting off every effort by Union forces to subdue their uprising.

Lincoln understood that their appeal to self-determination was dubious at best. The self-determination the Confederate states desired was the freedom to protect the legalized slavery of 3.9 million black people, purely on the basis of their race, in defiance of what the Declaration of Independence had to say about equality.

And having taken that step away from equality, the Confederacy had kept moving further and further away until its entire life came to resemble a European aristocracy. The Confederacy established an internal passport system for all persons, levied a steeply graduated income tax, appropriated private property for military use, and nationalized Southern industries—iron-making, clothing for military uniforms and even railroads. Even among whites, a disdainful hierarchy of thousand-bale cotton planters and poor white sandhillers emerged.

“The admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes, and for a landed aristocracy and gentry, is undisguised and apparently genuine,” marveled the British journalist William Howard Russell in 1861. King Leopold I of Belgium, in 1863, hoped that the Civil War would “raise a barrier against the United States and provide a support for the monarchical-aristocratic principle in the Southern states.”

No wonder, then, that Lincoln exulted when the Confederate army under Robert E. Lee met with a climactic defeat by Union forces at the small Pennsylvania crossroads town of Gettysburg in July 1863. In Lincoln’s mind, there was a symbolic coincidence in receiving the news of the Gettysburg victory on the Fourth of July. It was, he told a crowd of well-wishers in Washington, as though a bright line had been drawn between “the first time” in 1776 that “a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self evident truth that all men are created equal,” and 1863, when “the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal” had “turned tail” and run.

When the invitation came to dedicate the Gettysburg cemetery in November, Lincoln painstakingly drafted a deeply compressed statement of what he understood the battle, and the Civil War as a whole, to be about. He began with a quasi-biblical flourish: “Fourscore 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.” The Civil War had assumed the form of a test, whether "that nation or any nation so conceived or so dedicated can long endure." But could it?

The problem—as those Southern aristocrats would have been quick to point out—was that democracy also injected an element of instability into society. If the humblest man had equal access to participating in government, what myriad kinds of chaos were likely to result from a government composed of “equals”—of shopkeepers, schoolteachers, farmers or mechanics—rather than by those who had been bred from their cradles to rule the land? The answer was argument, dissension and civil war, which is why the South’s secession so delighted its aristocrats.

Gettysburg provided the most eloquent refutation of their world view. The soldiers who died on the battleground to preserve the Union had been exactly those dull, commonplace boors the aristocrats disdained.

The real question Lincoln wanted to pose in his address was whether the American people were still willing, as had been the “honored dead,” to devote themselves to “that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” On that hung the issue, not just of slavery, but of democracy itself. If Americans could so rise, Lincoln said, then the nation could experience a political version of a revival—a “new birth of freedom”—and the government of the people so despised in every European palace “shall not perish from the earth.”

The age of plantations and masters has passed away, helped in no small measure by the people who rallied to Lincoln’s challenge. But the perverse suspicion that the people understand too little to determine their own fate has by no means disappeared. And if it no longer marches in epaulets and cocked hats, it still speaks in the accents of efficiency and centralization. Not hierarchy, but bureaucracy, has become the new agent for imposing stability and “fairness” handed down from on high.

The Battle of Gettysburg ended 150 years ago. But the democratic principle it was fought for still requires defending. And in the long view, its best defense may be the 272 words Lincoln uttered at Gettysburg. My great-grandfather seems to have thought so, and so do I.