When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
like ordinary speech. High political rhetoric until Lincoln had tended to look to Rome or Greece, for both structure and vocabulary. The phrase ‘conceived in liberty’ is an echo of Cicero’s argument that the only constitution in which a citizen can flourish is a republic. But stylistically, Lincoln here exemplifies the link between successful oratory and plain speech. Great rhetorical prose is not complex. It is ordinary speech elevated to the heights.
The entire text can be read out in under two minutes, and the concision is all the more marked by the fact that the audience had waited so long for it. The procession that had escorted Lincoln to the field had been greatly delayed. Everett, the day’s main orator, then took his time getting to the platform. Before he spoke there was a lengthy prayer and some music, and then he spoke for all of two hours. By the time Lincoln rose to the lectern, the audience had been on its feet for close to four hours.
It was worth the wait. The opening words are a date spoken in a musical cadence, but also more than that. ‘Fourscore and seven years’ takes the listener back from 1863 to 1776, the moment of the Declaration of Independence, rather than to 1791, the signing of the Constitution. Lincoln is making a critical point: he is saying that the ideals of the revolution have been violated in the Civil War. If the war is to honour the dead it must be fought for a purpose higher merely than preserving the Union. It must hark back to the founding idea that ‘all men are created equal’. Without once mentioning the word, Lincoln is talking about slavery. In January of 1863 Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery is nowhere in his text but it is everywhere.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
The repetition of the word ‘nation’, which recurs five times, shows what, and how much, Lincoln believes to be at stake. The words ‘nation’ and ‘birth’ share a common root and often come back together at moments of heightened rhetoric. As early as the second sentence, Lincoln upsets the equilibrium he has established in the first. The nation, defined in the respect for the equal moral worth of all, is placed in peril in a single crisp sentence.
To say so much so quickly requires complete control, which raises the question of how a text so learned could be composed by a man of such jejune education. Writers are often asked where their ideas come from. The best answer may be Larkin’s: ‘pure genius’. Fitzgerald perhaps came closer to the truth when he wrote, in a letter to his daughter which described exactly what he never did himself, that a good style forms through good reading. Lincoln is known to have read Aesop’s Fables. Robert Burns was his favourite poet and he knew both the Bible and Shakespeare. There is, though, some magical property in verbal composition that can make a novelty out of a reading list, and Lincoln had that mesmerising quality.
We know that the words are Lincoln’s own because we have the testimony of his private secretary, John G. Nicolay, who saw the text, written in ink, in Lincoln’s hand. Nicolay also points to an important truth when he says that Lincoln wrote half the speech the day before he left Washington and the other half when he arrived in Gettysburg. Political speech has a short half-life. It goes stale fast and should therefore be composed as close to the deadline as possible. Bad writers are apt to think they will get better by taking longer, but taking pains can simply add to the agony.
This is quite different from the myth, which first appeared in a 1906 book by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews called The Perfect Tribute, that Lincoln was so slapdash that he composed the speech, literally, on the back of an envelope. The Gettysburg Address attracts myths. Harriet Beecher Stowe also claimed that Lincoln had written the speech in a few moments, and Andrew Carnegie insisted that Lincoln had used his pen. Don’t believe a word of it. It is clear from the finished version, let alone from the surviving manuscripts, that, though the craft cut close to the deadline, Lincoln himself worked on it until he had the desired effect.
We are met on a great battle-field 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.
Lincoln is taking a risk with this speech. He is speaking at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four months after the Confederacy forces were defeated there by the Union armies in the only battle in the war to be fought on Northern soil. More than 40,000 men had been wounded and 5,000 had perished. Most had been hastily buried in shallow graves just where they had fallen. The citizens of Gettysburg, led by Judge David Wills, had purchased seventeen acres of ground on Cemetery Hill. The graves were arranged in a semicircle and a speaking platform erected to face away from the buried dead so that the gathered would not defile their memory by trampling on the graves.
The setting could scarcely have been more sombre, yet Lincoln’s references to the gravity of the day are rapid and perfunctory. He does not, as Everett had before him, recite a roll-call in remembrance of the American dead. No sooner has he read this parish notice than he changes the subject, in a shift reminiscent of the Funeral Oration of Pericles, from the individual to the nation. The speech is sprinkled with the imagery of birth, life, and death in reference to a nation ‘brought forth’, ‘conceived’, and a system of government that shall not ‘perish’. The dead of the battle have become the nation incarnate.
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.
This is as clever a transition as you will find in all public speech. The triple formulation ‘we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow’ is a routine rhetorical device. The language is resonant but the cliché is really transformed by what Lincoln does next. He picks up the word ‘consecrate’ to note that the combatants on this ground have done more in deed than he can ever do with words. Then, even better, he repeats the idea of dedication but alters its meaning. The first instance refers to the dedication of sacred ground; the second implores the people of the United States to complete the revolution. A smooth transition is one of a speech’s technical problems and Lincoln here packs it into a single word. Surreptitiously, with a disguised repetition, he slides from the dedication of a memory to the dedication to a cause. With subtle brilliance that no listener will notice, Lincoln has moved from the past to the future, the direction of every good speech.
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.
Lincoln shows that the only rule in writing is that there is no rule that cannot be broken if the speaker retains control of the words. This single sentence is set up and paid off with four succeeding clauses, all referring back to the beginning. In the hands of a poor writer it would be too long, but the broken rhythm enhances the effect when the flourish comes. Speeches should accelerate, intellectually and audibly, as they come to their end. The repetition of ‘dedication’ enlists the dead in Lincoln’s cause as he states, much as we shall see Pericles doing, that they died for the purpose he is applauding. Whether they did or not is really a moot point.
The only extempore addition to the script was the phrase ‘under God’. It was an uncharacteristically spontaneous revision for Lincoln, but he kept the change in all three copies of the address he prepared later. The phrase under God became controversial again in 2013 when, in a recording he made of the Gettysburg Address, Barack Obama omitted the improvised phrase. This loosed a volley of criticism that Obama was censoring and secularising Lincoln’s words. In fact he did nothing of the sort. There are five extant versions of the Gettysburg Address, only three of which contain the phrase ‘under God’. Obama was reading from Nicolay’s draft, the