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Sometime after 11 p.m., Lincoln came downstairs, the pages of his speech in his hands. He wanted to talk with Seward, perhaps to share his draft with the colleague whose judgment he most respected and trusted. He walked over to the Harper house and remained there with Seward for about an hour before returning to his room and retiring. The huge, boisterous crowd on the public square, however, did not retire so easily. “They sang, & hallooed, and cheered,” French recalled. Listening from his window, he heard a full chorus of the popular refrain “We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.”

After breakfast the next morning, Lincoln made his final revisions, carefully folded the speech, and placed it in his coat pocket. Mounting a chestnut horse, he joined the procession to the cemetery. He was accompanied by nine governors, members of Congress, foreign ministers, military officials, and the three cabinet officers. Marine lieutenant Henry Clay Cochrane recalled that Seward, riding to Lincoln’s right, was “entirely unconscious” that his trousers had pulled up above his shoes, revealing “homemade gray socks” unbefitting the occasion.

An audience of roughly nine thousand stretched away from the platform in a half circle. Lincoln was seated in the front row between Everett and Seward. For two hours, Everett delivered his memorized address, superbly recounting the various battles that had taken place over the three dramatic days. Lincoln reportedly “leaned from one side to the other and crossed his legs, turning his eyes full upon the speaker. Somewhat later he again shifted his position and rested his chin in the palm of his right hand.” Another member of the audience remembered Lincoln removing his speech and glancing over it before returning it to his pocket.

French lauded Everett’s speech, believing it “could not be surpassed by mortal man.” Several correspondents were less enthusiastic. “Seldom has a man talked so long and said so little,” wrote the editor of the Philadelphia Age. “He gave us plenty of words, but no heart…. He talked like a historian, or an encyclopaedist, or an essayist, but not like an orator.”

As Everett started back to his seat, Lincoln stood to clasp his hand and warmly congratulate him. George Gitt, a fifteen-year-old who had stationed himself beneath the speaker’s stand, later remembered that the “flutter and motion of the crowd ceased the moment the President was on his feet. Such was the quiet that his footfalls, I remember very distinctly, woke echoes, and with the creaking of the boards, it was as if some one were walking through the hallways of an empty house.”

Lincoln put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and glanced down at his pages. Though he had had but a brief time to prepare the address, he had devoted intense thought to his chosen theme for nearly a decade. As Garry Wills observes in his classic study of the address: “He had spent a good part of the 1850s repeatedly relating all the most sensitive issues of the day to the Declaration’s supreme principle.” During the debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln had frequently reminded his audiences of the far-reaching promises contained in the Declaration of Independence. Someday, he said, “all this quibbling about…this race and that race and the other race being inferior” would be eliminated, giving truth to the phrase “all men are created equal.”

Twenty months before the Emancipation Proclamation, the president had told Hay that “the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,” predicting that “if we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.” Now tens of thousands had died in pursuit of that purpose. At Gettysburg, he would express that same conviction in far more concise and eloquent terms.

“Four score and seven years ago,” he began,

our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated