It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg Address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.               

(Ernest Hemingway)

Someone like Abraham Lincoln comes along once in a century – or perhaps even longer.

One biographer named him “an orator of immortal fame…the most honored and respected man of his generation.”1

At the centennial of Lincoln’s birth in 1909, someone who lived on the other side of the world proclaimed of him that, “His supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character. Washington was a typical American, Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian. He was much bigger than his country – bigger than all the Presidents together.” The man who said those words was the writer and activist Leo Tolstoy, uttered to another during the last months of his own life in Russia. Over a century later, the fame of Lincoln proves that Tolstoy’s opinion carries weight. But why?2   

While Lincoln’s leadership held many beneficent characteristics, one of Lincoln’s strongest traits was his ability to communicate with this audiences. He did this both in speaking and in writing.

Lincoln’s humanity came through in his oral and written arguments, largely because he had endured tremendous sorrow and crippling poverty – so he understood suffering. His own life experiences enabled him to connect with a wide audience.

The soul of Lincoln can be glimpsed in his writings and his speeches, demonstrating the power they conveyed. Their facets are multitudinous and offer an amazing combination of plain-spoken prairie logic and literary poetry.

In his annual speech before Congress in the waning days of 1862, Lincoln’s lengthy prose offered this jewel of oratory: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves….This fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation….We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.”3

Lincoln’s words often blend the plain with the elevated prose to perfection. His use of adjectives and choice of verbs make all the difference.

In the same speech he offered this sentence as well: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.”4

With the mere utilization of the preposition “with” instead of the more commonly used “to”, all who heard him knew his resolve to not allow the situation to get the better of him. He would stay steadily at the helm throughout the war – eye to eye with whatever came on the attack – to keep the nation going.

Lincoln only rarely used rhetoric – that lofty use of prose to persuade someone to one's way of thinking. Rhetoric included the tricks of oratory, such as hyperbole, increased volume to drive home a point, and often employing alliteration or lofty metaphors. While Lincoln did employ metaphors on occasion, as exemplified in his Gettysburg Address, he preferred logic and practicality. He understood the intelligence of the plain-spoken people. He had grown up among them and he knew their ability to grasp the issues. He also understood their character. He never spoke “down” to anyone. For him, everyone was his equal.

In one of his debates against Senator Stephen A. Douglas, which thrust Lincoln onto the national stage, he expressed his belief in equality for all when he said, “Our government was not established that one man might do with himself as he pleases and with another man too.” He was so often straight to the point.5

Lincoln’s combination of the lofty with the practical connected with his audience.

His Cooper Union speech in New York City catapulted him into the candidacy for the Presidency in 1860. Already a national figure because of the attention from his debates with Senator Stephen Douglas for the Illinois Senate race, Lincoln did not disappoint. He answered succinctly and with fervor, as the crossroads of the country became increasingly divided due to the slavery question. In defending the Constitution and the importance of national cohesion, he boldly answered any question or denouncement that the slaveholding South launched against the Republican party. “You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people,” he said. “Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles…license to such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite…Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.”6

He then brought up the published charges brought by the South, denied them, and demanded evidence. Proof, he alleged, that they could not provide. His audience was enthralled, not only with his words, but the sincerity and fervor with which he uttered them.

His famous conclusion that night in February of 1860 is classic Lincoln that united the North around him: “Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”7

War came as he ascended to the Presidency, and lasted almost until his final hours in office.

For those four years of conflict, Lincoln was harangued almost incessantly by the press, by naysayers, even by his Cabinet. He could think on his feet and come up with a quick retort, often using a story to illustrate it. During the war, groups of critics regularly found their way into Lincoln’s office. One day, Lincoln grew tired of hearing a certain deputation finding fault with his Administration. He used a parable illustrating the internationally known French acrobat, Charles Blondin, who in 1859 had walked across the Niagara Falls Gorge on a tightrope to great fame. “Gentlemen,” Lincoln said, “suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put in in the hands of Blondin to carry across the Niagara River [Gorge] on a rope; would you shake the cable and keep shouting at him, ‘Blondin, stand up a little straighter – Blondin, stoop a little more – go a little faster – lean a little more to the North – lean a little more to the South?’ No, you would hold your breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safely over. The government is carrying an immense weight. Untold treasures are in our hands. We are doing the very best we can. Don’t badger us. Keep quiet, and we will get you safe across.”8

The Gettysburg Address is considered Lincoln’s greatest speech. In a day when speeches lasted for hours, and rhetoric flowed like water, Lincoln’s short oratory on that November day in 1863 was all the more sublime because of its brevity. In just 272 words, a mere two minutes, Lincoln’s utterance was powerful and invoked awe among the vast audience in the Soldiers National Cemetery.

In his short oratory, Lincoln employed the metaphor of birth and death – and poetically yet simply used the parallel of human sacrifice at Gettysburg to prolong the life of a young nation in danger of its own death. Lincoln’s words struck a chord with the American populace. With the famous beginning of “Fourscore and seven years ago”, a mere 87 years, he demonstrated that our nation was young indeed.

Yet, by saying the more archaic term rather than stating the number of years, it added an ancient atmosphere to his speech – reminding his audience, and subsequently the world (as the whole world was certainly watching), that the wish for liberty was an eternal one.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is actually written in chiasmus, an ancient Hebrew writing style that is expressly familiar in Biblical writing, particularly Isaiah. It is where one line mirrors the next, and those two lines coincide with the ending lines as well – which also mirror each other – to form a perfect circle of prose.  There is a central message that stands alone. In Lincoln’s address, it is “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” It was, after all, the reason he came to Gettysburg, to dedicate the first National Cemetery.9 

It is highly difficult to write in this manner, yet Lincoln, who grew up reading the Bible, somehow grasped it.

His ending phrase was the summation of all for which the people of the North were fighting:

“That this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” And Lincoln had great faith in the American people to do the right thing.10

While some newspapers excoriated Lincoln’s’ address, most who heard it took what he said to heart. Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg galvanized a war-weary populace. They found a renewed strength to keep fighting for the sake of the nation – a nation where the people governed and no monarchy or totalitarianism would ever reign.

Lincoln’s ability to communicate with the Union soldiers created the most superlative of connections. At the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address in 1914, a veteran soldier from Gettysburg, Theodore McAllister, addressed a congregation at the Presbyterian Church on Baltimore Street. He spoke of meeting Lincoln during the war, after the Battle of Antietam in 1862. As his regiment, known as Coles Cavalry, rode to Frederick to aid the wounded in boarding trains for diverse hospitals, McAllister spied Lincoln at the depot.

“Standing upon that platform we saw the saddest countenance and the most careworn looking man we had ever looked upon,” McAllister remembered. It was, of course, President Lincoln. McAllister, who was astride his horse and close to Lincoln, watched the President as he briefly addressed the men. One of the commanders of the regiment whispered something to Lincoln, and Lincoln instantly changed his plaintive countenance to one of cheerfulness. He said, “Comrades, my heart has felt like busting asunder at the saddest of all sights, which I never beheld, in the valleys of yonder mountains. But your friend and my friend, Major Steiner, cheered me up somewhat by just now telling me of the heroic service you and your command have so recently performed. This train will now move. I cannot talk to you further. I can only shake hands with this comrade for you all, and thank you and say God bless you and keep each one of you.”11

Lincoln then reached out and grabbed the hand of Theodore McAllister, who said years later in 1914, “I felt the grip of that mighty hand which thrilled me like an electric shock.”12

As the train pulled away and McAllister turned his horse to return to his regiment, he noticed the soldiers openly weeping, the tears coursing down their cheeks, unashamed. “As we wheeled into column,” McAllister recalled, “the one who rode off to my side…said with a quiver in his voice…‘My God, I would charge into the gates of Hell for that man’.”13

Lincoln’s tenure as President was indeed tiring. Photographs of him, comparing his face at the beginning of his time in Washington to the end of it, demonstrate the toll his office took on him. He was heard to remark, “I wish George Washington or some other old patriot were here to take my place for awhile so that I could have a little rest.”14

His rest came on the morning of April 15, 1865, when he succumbed to an assassin’s bullet. It was Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, one who often found fault with the 16th President, who quietly said at Lincoln’s death, “There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen. Now he belongs to the ages.”15

Leo Tolstoy believed that Lincoln’s leadership would affect the entire world, and that his example was a lasting one: “The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar, or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln. His example is universal, and will last thousands of years.”16

It matters what we say, and even more how we say it. Lincoln, America’s greatest communicator, masterfully managed both, and in doing so saved that last, best hope of earth.

Sources: Curtis, William Eleroy. Abraham Lincoln. Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1902. The Gettysburg Address File, Gettysburg National Military Park (hereafter GNMP). Goodwin, Doris Kearns: Goodwin, Tolstoy & Lincoln: Insights by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Docwerlin.com/2019/doris-kearns-goodwin.  Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. The Latin Library: Latinlibrary.com/civilwarnotes.   Lincoln, Abraham. Abraham Lincoln Selected Writings. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2013. McAllister, Theodore. “Address given at the Gettysburg Presbyterian Church, November 19, 1914.” Civilian Accounts File, Adams County Historical Society (hereafter ACHS).

End Notes: 

1. Curtis, p. 15. 

2. Goodwin, Team of Rivals, p. 748. 

3. Lincoln, pp. 672-673. 

4. Ibid. 

5. Ibid., p. 565. 

6. Ibid., p. 586. 

7.  Ibid., p. 594. 

8. Curtis, p. 292. 

9. The Gettysburg Address, GNMP. 

10. Ibid. 

11. Theodore McAllister File, ACHS. 

12. Ibid. 

13. Ibid. 

14. Curtis, p. 278. 

15. Thelatinlibrary.com. 

16. Goodwin, Tolstoy & Lincoln, docwerlin.com.