Abraham Lincoln’s Legendary Gettysburg Address Promised ‘Government of the People, by the People, for the People’

On November 19, 1863, near the site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln offered a short but seminal vision of the past and promise of the United States in a speech known as the Gettysburg Address.

The brief speech—just 272 words arranged into ten sentences—was part of a dedication ceremony of a new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, honoring the thousands of Union soldiers who died in the July 1863 battle. Before the president took the stand, bands played, reverends spoke prayers and Edward Everett, a well-known lecturer and politician, delivered a 13,000-word oration, laden with references to Greek antiquity, that lasted over two hours.

When it was Lincoln’s turn to speak, he only took about two minutes. But the speech’s effect, exemplified by its oft-recited opening line—“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”—has lasted more than a century.

Compared with the overtly classical content and tone of Everett’s speech, which was intended to elevate the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War to epic status, Lincoln’s words and message were sparse and humble. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled [on this battlefield],” Lincoln said, “have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” The cemetery, the Battle of Gettysburg, the contradictions of the United States and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence were far more important than he could put into words.

The Gettysburg Address: The Two-Minute Speech That Saved America

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Lincoln spoke of the nation’s struggle in “a great civil war” testing the democracy’s ability to endure. It was his aim to promote a deeper resolve among his listeners—not just to honor the dead, but to keep fighting their fight and defending the ideals they fell to protect. As such, he promised “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.”

In his eulogy for Lincoln two years later, Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator and leading abolitionist, lauded the Gettysburg Address as “a monumental act” made even more poignant by Lincoln’s assassination just after the Civil War’s conclusion in April 1865.

In response to Lincoln’s modest claim in the address that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” Sumner thought the late president was deeply mistaken. “The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it,” Sumner eulogized. He was right—though just 15,000 people are thought to have heard Lincoln speak that day, the address has since become a touchstone of American rhetoric.

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Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.