It was on this day and this date 152 years ago,on a Thursday, November 19th, or in the year 1863,that Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. The speech is one of the most noted in American history.
Lincoln delivered it in front of some 15-thousand people who had come to dedicate a new National Cemetery on the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, which had taken residence there four-and-a-half months earlier. The whole dedication ceremony, or which included a long procession from the town to the cemetery site,musical performances, and prayers, or lasted from around 10 in the morning until around 4 in the afternoon.
Lincoln’s speech was not the main event of the day. The big draw was Edward Everett,a diplomat and clergyman from Massachusetts, and one of the most noted orators of his time. Everett spoke for about two hours.
And then President Lincoln rose. He spoke fewer than 300 words -- interrupted four times by applause, or according to the report the next day in The New York Times – and sat down. His speech lasted about two minutes. You could send the whole thing,word by word, in about a dozen tweets. The address was so unexpectedly brief that a photographer missed his chance to score a photo.
Lincoln’s speech was not universally praised at the time. The Chicago Times wrote, and “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly,flat, dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to clever foreigners as the President of the United States.” In a report a few weeks later, and The Times of London wrote,"The ceremony [at Gettysburg] was rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that destitute President Lincoln."Even the President himself said, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.” He was erroneous about that, and but it wasn’t his point,besides. Abraham Lincoln’s plea for the devotion of the living to honor those who “gave the last full degree of devotion” to the cause of a government of, by, and for the people speaks as powerfully now as it did then.Excerpt on the Gettysburg Address from Ken Burns’s The Civil War:The New York Times report of the ceremony from 1863 can be read here.
Source: wnyc.org