Want to Understand America? Study the Gettysburg Address
November 12, 2025
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Most Americans know at least the opening line of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “Four score and seven years ago” has become so familiar that we rarely stop to consider why Lincoln chose those particular words, or what he was really trying to tell us about the meaning of the Civil War and the American experiment itself.
The popular image of Lincoln scribbling his famous speech on the back of an envelope during a train ride to Gettysburg makes for good storytelling, but it’s completely false. Lincoln spent weeks carefully crafting every word of his brief remarks. He continued revising the speech up until the night before he delivered it on November 19, 1863, and he even made spontaneous additions while standing at the podium. This was no hasty afterthought. Lincoln knew exactly what he was doing.
The occasion was the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, several months after the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. From July 1 through 3, 1863, Union and Confederate forces clashed in what would become the war’s turning point. By November, the dead had been buried, and Lincoln traveled to Pennsylvania to help consecrate the ground where so many had fallen.
Lincoln was not even the main attraction that day. The featured speaker was Edward Everett, a Harvard professor and the most celebrated orator of his generation. Everett brought a massive pile of papers to the podium, then proceeded to deliver his entire two-hour speech from memory without consulting his notes even once. The crowd had just endured this marathon oration when Lincoln rose to speak. His address lasted just over two minutes. Many photographers present didn’t even have time to set up their equipment before Lincoln had finished and returned to his seat.
Yet Everett himself recognized immediately what Lincoln had accomplished. In a letter written after the event, Everett told Lincoln: “I should flatter myself to think that I came as close to expressing the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
The Poetry of Plain Language
Lincoln’s 272 words are remarkably simple. Most are just one or two syllables long. These are Anglo-Saxon words, Germanic words, the language of common people rather than the elaborate Latinate vocabulary of formal oratory. There’s a rhythm and cadence to the speech, almost like poetry. You can hear it in the very first 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.”
But why say “four score and seven years ago” instead of “87 years ago” or simply “in 1776”? The answer reveals Lincoln’s deeper purpose. This phrasing comes directly from the Bible, particularly the Old Testament language of patriarchs and the Psalms. Psalm 90:10 speaks of human lifespans: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
By using this biblical language, Lincoln was making a subtle but profound point. Human beings have expiration dates. The founding generation had already been “cut off” and “flown away.” The nation itself was now older than a single human lifetime. Would nations also die? Would America follow its founders to the grave? These were not abstract questions in November 1863. The nation was literally tearing itself apart.
From Self-Evident Truth to Proposition
Lincoln’s opening paragraph points backward to 1776 and the founding of a new nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But careful readers will notice that Lincoln slightly altered Thomas Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson had written about “self-evident truths.” Lincoln called equality a “proposition.”
This change was deliberate. A self-evident truth is something that remains true for all people in all times and places. Once you understand it, its truth is obvious. Jefferson and the other founders had declared that Americans were “one people” who held certain self-evident truths, including the truth that all men are created equal.
But by 1863, a significant portion of the nation no longer believed this. The Confederacy had built its entire political system on the opposite premise: that all men are NOT created equal and that slavery is right and natural. Even in the North, many questioned or rejected the Declaration’s principle of equality. Lincoln acknowledged this transformation by calling equality a “proposition,” something that could be accepted or rejected, something that might or might not be true. The nation that had begun with shared self-evident truths now found itself questioning its most fundamental premise.
That Nation, Not This Nation
The second paragraph brings us into the present: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Lincoln explains that they have gathered to dedicate a portion of the battlefield “as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
Read that phrase again: “that that nation might live.” It sounds clunky, almost wrong. Why not “this nation” or simply “the nation”? But Lincoln’s awkward phrasing is intentional. He wants us to stumble over those words, to stop and ask ourselves: which nation?
If Lincoln had said “this nation,” he would have been referring to the divided, war-torn America of 1863. But he says “that nation,” pointing back to the one conceived in liberty in 1776. The soldiers buried at Gettysburg didn’t die for the fractured nation of the present. They died so that the founding nation, the one dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, might live.
This also answers a question many don’t think to ask: who is buried in the Gettysburg National Cemetery? The answer is only Union soldiers. Confederate dead were initially buried there by accident, but when the mistake was discovered, those bodies were exhumed and moved to a Confederate cemetery. Only those who gave their lives for that nation, the one founded on equality, could rest in that sacred ground.
A New Birth of Freedom
The structure of Lincoln’s three paragraphs tells a story. The first paragraph is about conception. In 1776, the founders conceived a new nation. The second paragraph is about the painful struggle of birth. The Civil War represents the nation’s birthing pangs, blood and toil and sacrifice as that nation fights to be born. The third paragraph looks to the future and “a new birth of freedom.”
Lincoln is careful with his words here. He doesn’t speak of a birth of new freedoms or of improving upon the founding. His vision is not to go beyond what the founders created but to bring their work to completion, to help America finally live up to its own principles. Through the war and the end of slavery, “this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.”
Those two words, “under God,” don’t appear in Lincoln’s written text. He added them spontaneously while speaking, still refining his message even in the moment of delivery.
The speech ends with perhaps its most famous line: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln believed that if self-government failed in America, it might fail forever across the entire world. America’s experiment mattered not just for Americans but for all of humanity.
The Power of Words
When Lincoln said “the world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” he wasn’t being entirely honest. Lincoln understood what great leaders throughout history have known: words give meaning to action. Without words to explain and interpret events, even great deeds fade into meaningless violence.
This is why Lincoln’s memorial in Washington surrounds his statue with his own words. It’s why American monuments consistently feature the words of Jefferson, King, and Roosevelt alongside their images. America is unique as a nation founded not on shared ethnicity or ancient tradition but on words and ideas. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” created America in 1776. “Four score and seven years ago” helped save it in 1863.
For anyone seeking to understand what America means and why it matters, the Gettysburg Address remains the essential text. In 272 simple words, Lincoln captured both the nation’s original promise and its ongoing struggle to fulfill that promise. His brief remarks that November day did what Edward Everett’s two-hour oration could not: they explained why the terrible sacrifice at Gettysburg mattered and what Americans must do to ensure that “these dead shall not have died in vain.”