Gettysburg Address
Background and Purpose
President Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the Union had won a huge and bloody battle that July (July 1 to 3, 1863). The main speaker, Edward Everett, talked for about two hours. Lincoln spoke for about two minutes, around 270 words. Five copies in Lincoln's handwriting survive, each slightly different, and the quotes here come from the Bliss copy, the last one he wrote and the only one he signed and dated.
Main Argument
- Equality as the nation's founding idea: Lincoln opens with "Four score and seven years ago," which is 87 years before 1863, so 1776. He dates the nation's birth to the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, and describes "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
- The war as a test: the Civil War is "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." In other words, it's a test of whether democracy itself can survive.
- A new birth of freedom: the living have to finish the soldiers' "unfinished work" so that the nation "shall have a new birth of freedom." Coming less than a year after the Emancipation Proclamation, this is widely read as a reborn nation where freedom would include the formerly enslaved.
- Popular sovereignty: Lincoln closes with the goal "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Power comes from the people, is used by the people's representatives, and exists to serve the people.
Big picture
The Gettysburg Address treats the Declaration as the country's mission statement and the Civil War as the moment the country had to prove it could live up to it. In under 300 words, Lincoln reframed the war as a fight to show that government by the people can work, and he put equality at the center of what the United States is supposed to be.
Uses for Argumentative Essays
- Principles: equality, popular sovereignty, and natural rights.
- Where it shows up: Unit 1, Topic 1.1 (EK 1.1.A.3, which says it "reaffirmed equality and popular sovereignty as defining foundations of democracy"). The CED also links it to Topics 2.4 and 2.7 (a president using a speech to shape national goals) and Topics 3.10 and 3.11 (equality as a goal of social movements and the government's response).
- In an argument essay: quote "government of the people, by the people, for the people" as evidence of popular sovereignty, or pair it with the Declaration and the Letter from Birmingham Jail to argue that the country's promise of equality has expanded over time through struggle.