Sometimes less is more.Įven for those Yankees who didn't master all 273 words of the Gettysburg Address in elementary school (or all 239 words, or all 266 - the number of words varies with the version), some of Lincoln's phrases have proved memorable. But although Lincoln said 'The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,' his words are burned into the American consciousness, while we have to check Wikipedia to find out what it was that Sen. The president we might call 16 today was a minor player at the ceremony, asked to give only 'a few appropriate remarks,' and so he spoke for a little over two minutes. Everett's 'Oration' lasted over two hours, so even if reporters did have tape recorders, their batteries would have gone dead by the time Lincoln took the podium. The president received his invitation to participate just two weeks earlier, a good two months after Edward Everett, the former Massachusetts politician and acclaimed speechifier, was invited to give the keynote address. Lincoln was actually the second speaker at Gettysburg on November 19. But even though its history was much simpler - Lincoln wrote most of his short speech in Washington, revising it in Gettysburg the night before the dedication of the National Cemetery - we have five different versions of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's handwriting, each slightly different, along with printed versions that appeared in newspapers, versions also showing variations in the text. And, of course, there are no sound recordings of Lincoln's speech. These are original, authoritative versions of America's founding documents.

You can see the original Declaration of Independence at the National Archives, along with the handwritten copy of the Constitution as approved by the Constitutional Convention, and the handwritten draft of the Bill of Rights. There's just no one hundred percent accurate record, spoken or written, of exactly what Lincoln said that day. Although it's famous, familiar, and was often memorized by schoolchildren (schoolchildren in the North, that is), the text of the Gettysburg Address is uncertain: we all know the words, or many of them, but it turns out that there are many Gettysburg Addresses, not just one. Or, to put it another way, the best-known American speech is seven score and ten years old. Today is the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

The gettysburg address copy