Made In America - Bill Bryson [53]
Lord Bacon, in ‘the true marshalling of the sovereign degrees of honour,’ assigns the first place to ‘the Condirotores Imperiorum, founders of States and Commonwealths;’ and truly, to build up from the discordant elements of our nature, the passions, the interests and the opinions of the individual man, the rivalries of family, clan and tribe, the influences of climate and geographical position, the accidents of peace and war accumulated for ages – to build up from those oftentimes warring elements a well-compacted, prosperous and powerful State, if it were to be accomplished by one effort or in one generation would require a more than mortal skill.
And this was just one of some 1,500 equally windy sentences. At 2 p.m., two long, cold hours after starting, Everett concluded his speech to thunderous applause – motivated, one is bound to suspect, more by the joy of realizing it was over than by any message derived from the content – and turned the dais over to President Lincoln. The audience of perhaps 15,000 people had been standing for four hours, and was tired, cold and hungry. Lincoln rose awkwardly, ‘like a telescope drawing out’, as one contemporary put it, adjusted his glasses, held the paper directly in front of his face and in a high, reedy voice delivered his address. ‘He barely took his eyes off the manuscript,’ according to one witness, as he intoned those famous words:
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.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. ‘The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Though Lincoln was never intended to provide anything other than some concluding remarks, this was breathtakingly brief. The Gettysburg address contained just 268 words, two-thirds of them of only one syllable, in ten mostly short, direct and memorably crystalline sentences. It took only a fraction over two minutes to deliver – so little, according to several contemporary accounts, that the official photographer was still making preliminary adjustments to his camera when the President sat down.
Far from taking the listener on a discursive trip through the majesties of imperial Rome or the glory that was Greece, the address contained no proper nouns at all. As Wills notes, it doesn’t mention Gettysburg or slavery or even the Union.32 Lincoln thought it a failure. ‘I failed: I failed: and that is about all that can be