Nov 18, 2013 3 min read

It’s probably inevitable that the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination would overshadow the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address this week. The trauma of Kennedy’s death is still within living memory, and was comprehensively covered by the media a half-century ago. By contrast, no one alive today was around when Abraham Lincoln delivered his brief but eloquent remarks at a dedication of a cemetery at the Civil War battlefield on Nov. 19, 1863.

There is no footage or sound recording of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, unlike Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech a century later, or Winston Churchill’s “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech upon becoming Britain’s prime minister in 1940. We do not even have any idea of what Lincoln’s voice sounded like, though the tones adopted by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2012 movie “Lincoln” are thought by many Lincoln specialists to be a pretty fair approximation.

That it would come to be regarded as perhaps the greatest slice of rhetoric in American history and one of the premier speeches in human history was not obvious at the time. In fact, Harrisburg’s Patriot & Union newspaper opted to “pass over the silly remarks of the president” in its editorial the next day (it should be noted that Harrisburg’s Patriot-News, that newspaper’s descendant, at long last retracted its “flawed” judgment of Lincoln’s speech last week). While Lincoln’s address took only a few minutes, the day’s main attraction was Edward Everett, a now-forgotten political figure and president of Harvard whose disquisition took two hours to complete. To the best of our knowledge, nothing in the 13,000-word oration that Everett delivered is pored over by students and scholars or carved in stone anywhere. This should surely serve as a reminder that more does not always equal better.

Delivered just four months after the Gettysburg battle left an equal number of Union and Confederate troops dead – an estimated 46,000, overall – Lincoln was left to provide comfort and inspiration, and demonstrate that the horrific degree of carnage in that skirmish and, indeed, in the whole war, was worth the price. As Drew Gilpin Faust, the current president of Harvard and a Civil War scholar, wrote in Sunday’s edition of The Washington Post, “His language offered to lift Americans above what they might otherwise understand themselves to be, to invest them in the work of saving a nation that was, as he put it in his annual message to Congress in 1862, ‘the last, best hope on Earth.'”

And while, as school children, we many have learned by heart Lincoln’s introduction, “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,” and that “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth,” we have to work continually on renewing that promise. As Gilpin Faust also pointed out, in an age of eroding voting rights, rapidly increasing economic inequality, and weakening social mobility and educational opportunity, and just weeks after the partial shutdown of the federal government, this is no easy task.