Anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address a reminder of substance
The man who preceded the president that day spoke for two hours, a speech of 13,607 words. He gave a noble speech, as befit a man who earned the title “orator,” recounting then-recent history, mourning the dead, encouraging the living.
“God bless the Union,” he said, “it is dearer to us for the blood of brave men which has been shed in its defense.” Finishing, Edward Everett — who had served as U.S. Secretary of State, U.S. senator, governor of Massachusetts and president of Harvard University — ceded the podium to the lanky rail splitter from Illinois.
Both men were there to honor the dead, but the president had been invited almost as an afterthought, a mere 17 days before the ceremony.
That afternoon, Thursday, Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln faced a divided nation still at war.
An estimated 15,000 people had come to the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa. At that place, from July 1–3, 1863, about 172,000 soldiers from the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia fought the Battle of Gettysburg. More than 7,500 soldiers died in the battle, which turned the tides of the Civil War in favor of the Union.
Despite this hard-won turn, it weighed heavy on the mind of every citizen that more than 250,000 people had died in this country’s bloodiest war. The nation and its people were suffering.
Lincoln faced the audience: “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.”
His speech was 273 words.
The next day, Everett wrote to Lincoln, “Permit me also to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the Cemetery. I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
Today, 147 years later, we know Lincoln’s words. We remember them, feeling just as keenly today “the last full measure of devotion” as when the words were uttered. They define American patriotism. They mean something.
Which brings us to the cacophony.
Now, we live in a flurry of words, a storm cloud, a blizzard, the shadow of a rogue wave. It’s constant, hysterical, static and the words never cease, shouting from ten thousand channels and an infinite Internet, braying, tweeting, bleating out through the mega-conductor of modern life.
But where are the words that mean something?
Where are the words we’ll remember from people trying to shout the loudest? When the tweets, RSS feeds and constant, frantic updates are a faded binary memory in shades of ones and zeros, when the 24-hour blather-o-matic cycle is stored on a hard drive somewhere, what will remain?
“Longer than deeds, liveth the word,” wrote Pindar, a fifth century B.C. Greek poet.
The thoughtful words, the measured words, the considered words. There is strength in those words.
Yet here’s Twitter. According to twitter.com Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo, in April there were 180 million Twitter visitors per month and 55 million tweets sent per day by 105 million registered users.
Several months later, it was estimated 65 million tweets were being sent every day, and 190 million monthly visitors to see them.
And those tweets? Around 140 words or less, fish in a barrel for any hand-wringers bemoaning the content and depth of modern communication. But these words are there and then they’re gone, nothing more than cotton candy, diaphanous and untethered words that dissolve and float away.
A Thursday tweet from author Paulo Coelho: “We are born with the fear of falling & the fear of loud noises. All other fears are acquired (a friend tells me).” Which is wonderful. Deep. Thought-provoking. Thank you. Aaaand… delete.
So, we are a people with an arsenal of 400,000 words (in the English language alone) and seemingly unlimited channels, and we struggle — to self-define, perhaps, or establish identity entirely. To carve a niche. To make money. To make sense of the whole thing.
We do this, and yet there’s a subconscious sense of tossing those words into the void. We talk too much, the whole “sound and fury, signifying nothing” problem.
“There are many things of a very affecting nature, which can seldom occur in the reality, but the words that represent them often do,” wrote Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, “and thus they have an opportunity of making a deep impression and taking root in the mind, whilst the idea of the reality was transient… Besides, many ideas have never been at all presented to the senses of any men but by words, as God, angels, devils, heaven, and hell, all of which have, however, a great influence over the passions.”
It could be argued that the saying is the thing, that there’s art in the void, that we can’t worry about the words once they’ve left our mouths (or fingers). And maybe that’s true.
But it’s obvious from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address that, for him, the saying wasn’t enough. It was about the changing, the bettering, the honoring, the transcending.
“Words are deeds,” wrote Welsh poet Charles Harpur. “The words we hear/May revolutionize or rear/A mighty state.”
Through history, we have profound evidence and collective memory of words that were uttered to mean something.
“Ask not what your country can do for you.”
“I will fight no more forever.”
“A date which will live in infamy.”
“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
“Ain’t I a woman?”
These are words of profound meaning, intended to express ageless feeling, or hope, or burden.
They were not uttered lightly, or frivolously. They are matchless words, words we remember.
But maybe it’s unfair to compare what we say day-to-day to words that were said in the midst of national or personal crisis, when the ground was jerking and the air was trembling, when the words were needed. It would be an unsustainable emotional pitch if lived daily.
Every word from our mouths can’t be the Gettysburg Address, then, but they can be, following the advice of Toastmasters International, said with passion. With sincerity. With a recognition that words, once said, cannot be unsaid.
Surely Lincoln hoped, that day at Gettysburg, that his listeners would feel even a portion of what he felt. He had only words to bring them to a remembrance of the sacrifice required of every citizen to sustain America.
And in the words of America’s poet Walt Whitman:
“Say on, sayers!
“Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth!
“Work on — (it is materials you must bring, not breaths;)
“Work on, age after age! nothing is to be lost.”
However quiet or seemingly small, say the words that mean something.
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THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
Delivered by Abraham Lincoln Nov. 19, 1863.
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 honored 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.