Soldiers' National Cemetery, Gettysburg

Two hundred and seventy-two words

The most famous American political speech is also one of the shortest. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address runs to 272 words and takes about two minutes to deliver. It was the second speech of the day.

The first speech was delivered by the celebrated New England orator Edward Everett — a former president of Harvard, a former Secretary of State, a man considered in 1863 the greatest living American public speaker. Everett spoke for two hours and three minutes, reciting 13 607 words from memory. His speech compared the Battle of Gettysburg to the Greek victory at Marathon and traced a long genealogy from classical Athens to the American Republic. It was the expected centrepiece of the dedication ceremony.

Lincoln's contribution was advertised on the programme as "Dedicatory Remarks". The President was an afterthought.

Everett himself recognised, within hours, what had happened. He wrote to Lincoln the next day:

I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.

What Lincoln actually said

The text Lincoln delivered, drawn from the two surviving working drafts in his own hand (the Nicolay copy and the Hay copy), opens with one of the most famous sentences in English political prose:

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.

The chronology is precise. Four score and seven — eighty-seven — years before 1863 is 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln was deliberately rooting the founding moment of the United States not in the 1787 Constitution (which preserved slavery) but in the 1776 Declaration's commitment to human equality (which did not). It is the rhetorical move that does the work of the entire speech.

The closing line is equally famous:

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The phrase was not original to Lincoln. The 14th-century English theologian John Wycliffe had used a version of it ("This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people") in the preface to his 1384 translation of the Bible. Daniel Webster had used a similar phrase in 1830. Lincoln took the formulation and gave it permanent currency.

The battle four months earlier

The dedication ceremony marked the new Soldiers' National Cemetery, the burial ground for the Union dead of the Battle of Gettysburg — the largest battle of the Civil War, fought 1 to 3 July 1863, four and a half months earlier.

The battle killed roughly 51 000 men in three days, three times the population of contemporary Gettysburg (about 2 400 in 1863). The small town was overwhelmed. Bodies of dead soldiers lay unburied on the surrounding farmland for weeks. Wounded men were laid on every floor of every house, barn, church and shed within ten kilometres. The smell of decomposition reached the township for months.

The Pennsylvania state government bought 17 acres of farmland on Cemetery Hill in August 1863 and contracted a Philadelphia landscape architect, William Saunders, to lay out the burial ground in a semicircular pattern around a central monument. By the date of dedication on 19 November, 3 512 Union dead had been reburied in the new cemetery. (Confederate dead were left in their original field graves and eventually relocated to Southern cemeteries in the 1870s.)

Why two minutes mattered more than two hours

In strategic terms, Lincoln used the Gettysburg Address to redefine the war.

Until November 1863, the official Union war aim had been the preservation of the federal union and the suppression of the Confederate rebellion. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 had added the abolition of slavery in Confederate-held territory as a war aim — but the proclamation was framed as a wartime executive order under the President's powers as commander-in-chief, not as a general declaration of principle.

The Gettysburg Address completed the redefinition. The war was no longer about preserving the existing union, but about completing the unfinished project of the Declaration of Independence — "a new birth of freedom", in Lincoln's phrase. The 360 000 Union dead were not casualties of a constitutional dispute but martyrs of the proposition that all men are created equal.

The speech was reprinted in newspapers across the United States and Europe within two weeks. It is today the most-memorised piece of American oratory and is engraved on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

It was 272 words long.