Gettysburg and Silence - Chantrill.net

Gettysburg and Silence 

Edwin Black 

1. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 

2. this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated 

3. to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

4. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that 

5. nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long 

6. endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have 

7. come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place 

8. for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. 

9. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 

10. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not 

11. consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground. The brave men, living 

12. and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our 

13. poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long 

14. remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did 

15. here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the 

16. unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly 

17. advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great 

18. task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take 

19. increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full 

20. measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead 

21. shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall 

22. have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by 

23. the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 1 

There is no more celebrated example of eloquence than the Gettysburg Address. From its first utterance to 

the latest moment, Lincoln’s speech has generated intense responses. Initially they were responses, often 

partisan, of appreciation and deprecation; more recently they have been the responses of reverence that an 

acknowledged masterpiece receives. The historical importance of the Address is beyond doubting. Its 

eminence has been extravagantly affirmed, as much by the passion of its detractors as by the veneration of its 

admirers. The effects attributed to it are prodigious, ranging from the subversion of republican government 2 

to the reconstitution of American political culture. 3 

Our era does not baffle itself about the quality of the Gettysburg Address. Its reputation has triumphed 

over hostility, parody, obscurity, and obsolescence. 4 The speech is fixed now in the history of a people. It is 

a testament of national identity. 

Gettysburg and silence; The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Annandale; Feb 1994; Vol. 80, Issue 1 Page 1 of 1

The Gettysburg Address has been, from its genesis, an aesthetic object. Its career has recapitulated that of 

many another exalted work of art, a career that begins, invisibly, as an amorphy of inchoate ideas within the 

mind of an author. Those mental fragments, combined and recombined under the impulse of aspiration, are 

subjected to an impenetrable process of discrimination and refinement by the author, who finally forms them 

into an autonomous creation. That product somehow takes hold; it endures; it survives controversy and the 

vicissitudes of fashion; in time it achieves, as the Gettysburg Address has, an iconic status: the artifact has 

transcended the condition of being evaluated by having become an exemplary definition of value itself. Its 

entry into that pantheon is signaled when it begins to elicit a set of critical questions reserved only for 

paradigmatic works: questions no longer about how it should be judged; but rather, questions about how it 

has shaped the culture to which it has become sacred, what the sources are of its influence, what the secrets 

are of its enchantments. The masterpiece becomes to the critic what the mountain is to the climber. 

Its reputation now established as a touchstone of public discourse, the Gettysburg Address is a subject 

that tests criticism more than it is tested by criticism. If the Gettysburg Address were a simple composition, it 

would long ago have depleted its own interpretive possibilities. 5 But the Address can probably not be 

exhausted by any single examination, and certainly not by any monistic one. Despite the inescapable 

temporality of its medium, it eludes even line-by-line or word-by-word analysis. The speech is at once too 

compressed and too intricate. It is so brief that its first portentous words are still held in the mind even as its 

last syllables are being comprehended. And yet, each element of the Address is so tightly implicated in other 

elements that its cumulative effect is but one of its multifarious effects. Its duration is an infrangible unity. 

The Address is prismatic. Its aspects reflect back and forth on one another such radiant multiplicity that, 

diamond-like, its fires are somehow both protean and integral. The complexity of the Address, which has 

been requisite to its ascendance, enables it to give back a singular answer to each critic who brings to it the 

question, how does it work? One mark of a masterpiece may be its critical inexhaustibility; its capacity to 

accommodate the diverse partialities of its observers, and yet to abide in its integrity. And the uniquely 

prismatic character of the Gettysburg Address brings it to reflect, with uncommon brilliance, any light that is 

thrown on it, however dim. 

How does one examine a prism? By looking at it through one facet after another, in no particular order. 

That will be the method here. It is a method without system and therefore scarcely a method at all, at least 

not a predetermined one. But times--maybe even all the time--a subject deserves to supersede a method, and 

to receive its own forms of disclosure. 

How does the Gettysburg Address function rhetorically? The answer is in the details. 

AUDIENCES 


The first paragraph of the Gettysburg Address seems addressed to the ages. Lincoln does not imply a 

particular audience. He speaks the voice of omniscience, articulating a historical narrative with incontestable 

certitude. The first paragraph is a description of national genesis. It is a purposeful creation, an initiating 

fusion of origin and essence: the generation not only of an entity, but also of a mission. That genesis and 

meaning stipulates the frame of the speech. Anyone who deny, doubt, or qualify the narrative is implicitly 

excluded from Lincoln’s audience. By announcing a major premise, the form of the first sentence signals 

that a deductive procedure has been started, and that the procedure will be according self-contained. The 

choice left the auditor is single: to be or not to be an auditor to this speech. 

The narrative of national creation is austere, its only concession to embellishment being the natal 

metaphor, but even that metaphor is so fundamental that the metaphor itself is almost dead. The moribundity 

of the metaphor prevents its being experienced as an embellishment; its inconspicuousness as a stylistic 

decoration is compatible with the spartan character of the first paragraph. That quality of barrenness in the 

style of the first paragraph is characteristic of the enunciation of first principles. (“In the beginning God 

created the heavens and the earth.”) No gratuities must be attached to an account that mandates unqualified 

commitment. The articulation of an absolute belief requires the exactitude of purity. The first paragraph’s 

narrative is advanced as absolute truth, and so it has no specifiable audience. It constitutes the initial 

statement of the facts of the case, the undisputed and undisputable ground for any judgment that may be 

issued by the rhetor or formed by an auditor. 

The second paragraph subsumes the war, the battlefield, and the ceremony to the synoptic historical 

narrative. The civil war is linked to the nation’s beginning by being a test of its founding principle (4-6). And 

the ceremony is linked to the civil war by its location and its purpose (6-9). In anticipation of the Address’s 

later reinterpretation of the occasion’s purpose, the paragraph ends with an assurance that its conventionally 

understood rationale is an appropriate product of historical circumstance: “It is altogether fitting and proper 

that we should do this.” 

“But” (10) begins a decisive shift in perspective. The “larger sense” (10) that will now inform the 

discourse is a sense no longer merely of appropriateness, but, more encompassing, of moral adequacy. “But” 

also crystallizes a shift of the object of the Address to the audience at Gettysburg. The immediate audience 

had been discussed (6-9) only in its relation to the larger historical account. Beginning with “but,” its 

capacities and obligations occupy the speech. The focus remains arrested on the cemetery at Gettysburg for 

awhile, reinforced by six references to “here”--six references in five lines (12, 14, 15, 16, 17). 

The word “here” tolls like a bell through that period of fixation on the present moment. It appears a total 

of eight times in the speech. Two functions, at least, can be attributed to the repetition of “here,” in addition 

to the enhancement of the rhythmic solemnity of the Address. One is the pointing these repetitions do of the 


occasion: their constituting a recurrent anchor for one moiety of a bipolar orientation in which the implicit 

“there,” which contrasts with “here,” is the future. During the section of the speech when the audience’s 

attention is fastened to the occasion, “here” serves to remind them not only of that occasion, but also of how 

bounded the occasion is, and of the co-existence with the “here” of a “there”: a different and less bounded 

time and place. “Here” is a particular location amidst infinity. “Here” is a particular moment during eternity. 

The other function of the repetition of “here” —a subtler function—relates to the pun on “hear,” a recurrent 

command issued to the audience to attend. Faintly, allophonically, Lincoln directs his audience to listen. 

The first-person plural references during the middle of the speech (6-14) all have the audience at 

Gettysburg at their center. With the instruction to “us the living” (15), however, the synecdochal character of 

the first-person plural begins reemerging to a point of unmistakable clarity (21) that “we” stand in deputy to 

the whole nation and act on its behalf. The audience, then, transcribes a movement through the speech from 

unspecified universal (1-3) to national (4) to local (6-14), back to national again. 

THE MOVEMENT OF THE ADDRESS 

A consideration of the implied audience brought us to observe that the word “But” in line 10 confirms a shift 

of perspective from the historical to the moral, and of object from a general to a more specific audience. This 

shift constitutes a hesitation: an arrest of time and place in the middle of the speech, a riveting on the present. 

The speech is so compressed that even that fixation passes too quickly to effect any sense of intellectual 

paralysis. The arrest is, rather, a short-lived entrancement, an instant in which the options are inventoried for 

the future of a moment whose past has been ascertained. What has led us to this moment is the subject of the 

speech from its beginning to “But.” 

“But” begins a process of rejection. The first two paragraphs of the Address constitute a historical setting 

of the occasion, and a normal extrapolation from the pronouncements of those paragraphs would lead toward 

performative utterance. Our past has led us to the point of declaring this burial ground sacred; but yet, we 

demur. Why? Because we have neither the right nor the duty. A moral intervention prevents the fulfillment 

of conventional form; a customary itinerary has been deflected. Our right has been superseded by those who 

have died. Our duty lies elsewhere: it is to take up the task left unfinished by the dead. The speech links us to 

the dead by virtue of the common task, and by the bond of our obligation to complete what they have left 

incomplete. 

If we think of the movement of the Address in terms of what Berenson has called “respirational values,” 

we can appreciate that the speech is temporarily arrested at the point of maximum contraction. 6 The 

narrowing of location from continent (2) to nation (2) to battle-field (6) to portion of that field (7) to resting 


place (7) finally pivots with “But” even to a rejection of our capacity to affect “this ground” (11). Then, in 

line 15, a movement recommences, and an expansion continues to the end. 

The second “rather” (17) is the second pivot of the speech. It decisively turns from the focus on the 

present and commences the movement into the future. The first “rather” (15) prepares for that pivot by 

shifting the subject from the dead to the living. It signals a throwing off of the immobility that restrains the 

middle of the speech; it is a bestirring, a resumption. With the second “rather,” the movement recommences, 

with its temporal and spatial directions clearly manifested. 

The “new birth of freedom” (22) echoes “our forefathers brought forth” (1). An implicit contrast 

sponsored by the speech is not just between living and dying; it is also between birthing and dying: a subtle 

distinction, perhaps, but crucial to the character of the Gettysburg Address. That latter contrast enables 

Lincoln to subordinate the living (13-14, 15-18) to the task of political renascence (22). 

The “brave men” (11) who “gave the last full measure of devotion” (19-20) have died, but in the end, it 

is a form of government that “shall not perish from the earth.” They “gave their lives that that nation may 

live” (8). There are two forms of life, then: the life of the nation, which must endure, and the lives of the 

fallen soldiers, who died in order that the nation may continue living. 

GEOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES 

The references to place have the same pattern of progressive confinement followed by progressive 

enlargement as does the implied audience. First, continent (2), followed quickly by nation (2). Nation is 

reiterated twice more (5). Then, a process of narrowing proceeds: battle-field (6), then portion of that field 

(7), then resting place (7). There follows a reference to nation (8), but nation there is not place; it is organism 

(“that that nation might live”). “This ground” (11) is a slight loosening of the geographical constriction, 

preliminary to an expansionary movement, which goes to “world” (13)—but not altogether a place either, 

since it has memory. Then “nation” (21), but having a birth, and so still an organism. And finally, the 

location of all knowable places: “the earth” (23). The designations of place, then, first proceed from 

“continent” to diminishing measures of location, to the nadir, “resting place.” Then the direction of 

movement is reversed, and it proceeds toward increasingly enlarged measures, to the apogee, “the earth.” 

The movement of spatial allusions is one of contraction followed by expansion. 

The geographical references juxtapose animate with inanimate associations. The movement begins 

with an inanimate “continent,” but moves quickly to the inanimate “nation,” iterated three times. Then, 

inanimate references, three again, to battle-field, portion of field, and final resting place. 


All five allusions to “nation” (2, 5, 8, 21) in the speech are in the same form, so that “nation,” while 

animate, is stable. But the inanimate geographical references continuously alter in focus· The variety of 

allusions to the site—“battle-field,” “portion of that field,” “resting place,” and “here” eight times--are 

variations in perspective, while the perspective on “the nation” is held constant. Moreover, the allusions to 

the site are uniformly inanimate--they allude simply to a place, but a place whose consecration is the issue 

presented by the speech. However, the references to other places—“nation” five times, and the world used 

synecdochically—are all animate, excepting only the ambiguous final reference to “the earth.” 

The speech presents two implicit and repeatedly reinforced geographical contrasts. One is the contrast 

between the site of Gettysburg, which is a consecrated place where lives were given, and “the nation,” which 

has been endowed with life from the first sentence. The second is between “the nation,” which is treated as a 

fixed conception in the speech, and all the other geographical references, which vary in size, location and 

function. Here we have one of the many ironies of the Address. While we would ordinarily associate 

stability--the cessation of change--with entropy and death, Lincoln sustains constancy in his animate 

conception of “the nation,” and diversifies his other geographical references, which are inanimate. A 

consequence is that “nation,” which is ostensibly a geographical term employed along with other 

geographical terms, is singularly endowed with the values of duration and viability. 

Finally, the earth. The cemetery at Gettysburg is a place where the earth receives the dead· Lincoln’s 

immediate audience would have had an active awareness of that fact, and even their successors are reminded 

by the speech of its setting (4-8). The earth, then, and all of its synecdochal variants—field, resting place, 

ground—is a continuously active referent in the web of meaning. And at the very end of the Address, where 

Lincoln specifies the earth as the place where the principle of the living nation will continue its life, he 

abruptly—with his last word—inverts a signification that preceded the speech in the minds of the auditors, 

and that the speech had been careful to maintain. In an instant, the resting place of the dead becomes the 

habitation of a vital principle, renascent and imperishable. The unity of the dead with the living is 

consummated in Lincoln’s last word, the common home of all. 

STRUCTURE 

The structural elegance of the discourse can be rendered statistically. The speech consists of 367 syllables. Its 

first pivot occurs at syllable 146; its second pivot at syllable 263. One-third through the syllables is at 122; 

two-thirds through at 244. The speech consists of 272 words. The first pivot is at word 103; the second pivot 

at word 193. One-third through the words is at 91; two-thirds at 182. 


The two major pivots in the speech are spaced with amazing precision. If the first word of the speech is 

given a value of 1, and the last word a value of 100, the first pivot occurs at word 37.8 (syllable 39.7); the 

second pivot at word 70.9 (syllable 71.6). If 33.3 and 66.6 represent a mathematical perfection of placement 

in each of the two cases, it is clear that Lincoln came remarkably close to such precision, considering that 

this was a speech and not a mathematical exercise. He is only twelve words off mathematical perfection in 

the first pivot and nine words off it in the second. 

If the speech is divided into twenty-three lines (as it is on my computer): nine lines constitute the 

statement of facts; then five lines constitute the pause; then nine lines constitute the resolution. The 

mathematical proportioning of the speech is so close to perfect that it seems almost formulary, yet it is 

inconceivable that it actually was. The two sections of movement are equal in length; the middle section of 

arrest is virtually half the length of either of the sections of the movement. 

In visual terms, the speech is shaped like an hourglass. Temporally, it is past, present, then future. Its 

visceral effects are contraction, strain, and then release. Respirationally, it is an exhalation, then a pause, then 

an inhalation. 

The structure of the Gettysburg Address imposes a corresponding form on the experience of its auditor. 

That experience is composed of initial tension, followed by tightening, followed by progressive exhilaration. 

The opening sentence concentrates the attention of the auditor and contributes to the auditor’s tension. In its 

effect, that sentence disciplines the auditor’s response. The first sentence is a command to be reverential, a 

command yielded by the archaic solemnity of the sentence and by the august historical perspective that it 

announces. The command is reinforced by the inherent gravity of the occasion and by the high office of the 

speaker. The tension is sustained through the narrative that brings the historical account to the moment of the 

ceremony (4-8). 

There is a brief, soothing reassurance (9), a promise that the contained energy of reverence will be 

discharged in an appropriate ceremony. But then, at that acme of expectation and vulnerability, the auditor’s 

strain is suddenly intensified by the ostensible denial that the ceremony itself could be efficacious (10-15). It 

is a repudiation that dislocates the reverence that had been initially sponsored by the speech. And that 

concussion of form is followed by yet another reversal: At the most potentially explosive point in the 

stressing of the auditor, a controlled release of the auditor’s tension begins (15). The medium of that release 

is the prescription for the continuing task of self-dedication by which the audience can be constructively 

absorbed and into which its reverence can be invested (15-23). 

In lines 10-20, we have a series of contrasts, first between us and “the brave men, living and dead, who 

struggled here,” and then, via the reference to “us the living” (15), between us and the dead: We cannot 

consecrate; they have consecrated. We say here; they did here. We have unfinished work; they nobly 

advanced work. We take devotion; they gave devotion. In each of these contrasts, we are passive and 

receptive; they who struggled are active and productive. Throughout these contrasts, our passivity is inferior 


to their activity. But at last we are given an activity (15-23) which can assuage the appetite that the contrasts 

have aroused: an appetite for moral equilibrium. This treatment of contrasts too is a pattern of strain followed 

by release. 

There is not an instant in the course of the speech when the experience of the audience is not subjected to 

its controlling configuration of tension and resolution. We are coiled by the Address, and then sprung. The 

structure of the Gettysburg Address is an organization of the auditor’s energy. 

SCOPE OF THE ADDRESS 

The Address has an oracular quality. The voice that speaks is not, at first hearing, an individual voice: it 

betrays no particular perspective. The speech abounds in first-references, but none is singular. 7 The fifteen 

first-person, plural references are concessions to the ceremony that has prompted the Address. 

The speech sustains distance from the dedicatory event; it hovers above the event, commenting on it in 

relation to history. Beginning with the founding of the Republic, the focus goes first to the war, then to the 

battle-field, then to the resting place, finally to the ceremony of dedication. However, after pronouncing 

approbation of the ceremony (9), the speech denies its efficacy (10-11), and proceeds to subordinate it to 

larger and longer-lived concerns. The treatment of the event too, then, follows the movement of the whole 

discourse. The view of the ceremony is initially expansive, then narrowing to the moment, then increasingly 

encompassing again until it reaches the limit of mortal experience. 

The speech concludes with human concerns situated within their widest possible latitude and their 

longest possible duration: their scope is all of the world, and all of human history. Whatever is beyond that 

conclusion is beyond the human scale. Beyond it is the infinite: the venue of the supernal and the 

unknowable. 

Lincoln’s discourse propels us in the direction of metaphysical transcendence, but / it stops at the 

boundary. It expands to subsume all of life, but it ceases at the point where life ceases, where death and 

infinity begin. Immediately beyond the scope of the discourse is ineffable mystery. The Gettysburg Address 

speaks words to the world of words, and it echoes silence before the vast silence that begins where speaking 

ends. 

The speech is not just a vindication of the Civil War, or a poem to democracy, or a meditation on the 

legacies of the dead and the obligations of the living. It is also a map and a chronicle: it locates a burial 

ground in relation to all of space, and it fixes that moment of location in relation to all of time. 

The ceremony at Gettysburg had begun with a prayer by the Reverend Doctor T. H. Stockton which was 

three and a half times the length of Lincoln’s speech. With amplitude and confidence, the Reverend Doctor 


Stockton expatiated on the relations between the casualties of battle and the divinity. But Lincoln, in his turn, 

does not presume to pronounce on the fate of the dead. He does not presume, even from his exalted office, to 

issue the consolation of spiritual immortality. There is no mitigation of bereavement, no anodyne, no 

euphemism, no benign illusion. He approaches the subject of the dead by approaching the realm of the dead, 

but approaching only, never pretending to intrude. He talks of the bequests of the dead, of their memorials, 

but not of their souls. He carries discourse and any claims to knowledge to the border of extinction and 

eternity, to the outermost boundary of life and of time, but there he stops, and if that journey is to be 

continued, it must be in the imaginations of his auditors, for whom he has supplied a momentum and a 

trajectory. 

What is extraordinary about that momentum and trajectory is not the transcendent conception toward 

which they propel the auditor, because that conception is really quite orthodox. It is the Great Chain of 

Being: the majestic cosmology of medieval Christendom that links time with timelessness, the past with the 

future, history with destiny, life with death and both with immortality That cosmology is not affirmed in 

Lincoln’s speech, but neither is it to the slightest degree contravened. It is suggested by the biblical echoes 

that resound in the account of the nation’s genesis: “Four score and seven,” and fathering a nation, and 

“brought forth.” 8 The distinction between dying, which may allow living on in another realm, and perishing 

from the earth, which implies anonymity and a complete cessation of existence, is also a reverberation of the 

King James Bible. 9 

The cosmology is an element of context---one with which Lincoln could be confident that his 

contemporary audiences would tacitly endow his speech. Lincoln knew his immediate audience’s general 

view of life and death, and he made his speech wholly compatible with that general view without committing 

himself to it. Lincoln’s tact confined him to exercising a solely secular authority. 

The cosmological implications of the Gettysburg Address are probably more disengaged in us than in 

Lincoln’s contemporaries. The idea of a Great Chain of Being is more faded in our time, a less active 

component of our convictions. We have, however, a perspective that is more than compensatory. It is 

augmented by the stronger sense of national identity that the Civil War made possible, and by our knowledge 

of Lincoln’s martyrdom, which lends the Address a poignancy that was unavailable to Lincoln’s 

contemporaries. In the end, then, we may infer that our responses are not quite equivalent in character to 

those of the immediate audience, but our responses may well be at least equivalent in intensity. 

CYCLES AND ARCHETYPES 


At the beginning, the nation is brought forth, and at the end, the nation has a new birth of freedom. The issue, 

finally, is not the life and death of the fallen, but the life and death and resurrection of the nation. One cycle 

embedded in the speech is, of course, the life-cycle of birth and death. The speech touches only the terminal 

poles of the cycle. No reference to growth or maturation appears in the speech, so that no intermediate 

historical interpretation is offered except of the war itself, an interpretation so purified of immediate 

reference and so frugal of emotionality as to seem epiphanic (4-6). 

Another cycle, more subtly present, is decay and regeneration: the cycle in which organisms decompose 

into fertile organic matter and become nutriment for other organisms. The speech hints at that relation 

between the dead soldiers and the nation (8). It can do no more than hint; obviously, an overt equation 

between the honored dead and compost would be an offensive and unfeeling reduction. But an audience 

close to natural processes and seasons, as Lincoln’s predominantly rural contemporaries were, would be 

sensitive to that hint, and would take it without flinching. Their piety and grief would inhibit their making 

any indelicate extension of the figure within their own imaginations. The hint, of course, is purely figural. 

Lincoln implies, alludes to a metaphor without explicitly declaring it. The allusion is a parsimonious 

reminder of a natural process; only its context works to provoke its being associated, by analogy, with 

obituary or patriotic motifs. The compression is striking: the containment within a very few words of a 

complex network of meaning. 

CEREMONIAL SPEECH 

Speaking has a variety of conventional functions. The most ordinary consist of conveying information— 

information about the world, or about oneself, or about one’s judgments of the world. Another less frequent 

but still familiar function of speaking is to settle a perdurable aura around an event--to commemorate it, or to 

celebrate it, or to endow it with significance. This function brings speech close to magic, not in the sense that 

words alone are expected to alter physical reality, but rather in the sense that words are expected to be 

constitutive, performative. The speech is to be itself a presence that is functionally indistinguishable from the 

event to which it alludes. The words that are spoken at ceremonial transitions work to fix and consign an 

event, to articulate a common interpretation of it, so to fashion a public memory of it that it can hardly 

thereafter be remembered in any other way This sort of speech conveys information in the strict sense in 

which anything called speech must convey information, but the information conveyed about the subject of 

ceremony is not new because the nature of that information is consensual, and the consensus has already 

been achieved prior to its expression. The conventional ceremonial speech aspires, at minimum, to declare 

that consensus, to dress an occasion in a socially necessary integument of words and, by remarking it, to 


mark it as remarkable. This sort of perlocution occurs in recognition of the fact that although there are times 

when silence is tributary, there are also times when silence is contemptuous, when words must be spoken. 

Moments of beginning and of ending require speech as a rhetorical ordination. 

THE DEDICATORY FUNCTION 

The contrast between the living and the dead that pervades the Gettysburg Address is played against the 

subject of consecration, which is the ostensible task of the ceremony containing the speech and the ostensible 

issue of the speech itself. Lincoln says, in effect, that the living cannot consecrate the graveyard; the dead 

already have. So, the task of the living is some other: it is to continue the work that the dead had begun. By 

linking the social task of the living and the dead, the speech resists a bifurcation between life and death, 

positing in its place a relationship of continuity That continuity, in turn, reduces the distinction between 

honoring and being honored, replacing it with a relationship of common work—”unfinished work” (16)— 

and creating an equality between the living and the dead instead of the hierarchy that had prompted the 

ceremony. Honoring and being honored also participate in an active-passive diremption which is foregone in 

favor of a common, if temporally distinguishable, activity of consecration. The deadness of the dead is thus 

not contemplated. Rather, their deaths are interpreted to have been an action rather than a condition as the 

dead are shifted from being objects of reverence to being prefiguring participants in a common quest. And 

that flattening of the relationship comports with the historical perspective that the speech sponsors, because 

while the living and the dead live and died as individuals, it is the life of the nation that is paramount in this 

speech. The conception of individuality is subdued in the Gettysburg Address; its only subjects are 

aggregations. Its author has even effaced himself. 

The dead were brave men; the living is the nation. Lincoln flirts with paradox in rendering the dead, who 

no longer have identity, as a plurality of individuals, but rendering the living as a composite. However, the 

paradox enables Lincoln’s auditors to experience bereavement and yet simultaneously to dissolve their egos 

into a collective resolution. That elusive combination would enable the audience’s mourning to attain an 

impersonality and still to ache. 

There is a pun on “dedicated.” The dedication of the cemetery is transformed into the dedication of the 

audience. The synonyms of “dedication” can be divided into three groups of terms: First, “allegiance, 

commitment, devotion, loyalty”; second, “consecration, designation”; third, “ordination, address, inscription, 

message.” Lincoln begins with a focus on the middle terms---consecration and designation--both in relation 

to the official establishment of a cemetery. But in turning the subject of the dedication from the cemetery to 

the audience, the sense of the term shifts to the first four meanings: allegiance, commitment, devotion, and 


loyalty, especially the middle two of these four. And, of course, the last three senses--address, inscription, 

and message--are implicit in Lincoln’s very act of speaking. 

Lincoln rings the complete round of resonances of the term “dedication.” We cannot, he is saying, 

dedicate this cemetery because the dead have already done that. We should, therefore, dedicate ourselves. 

The implicit premise is that something must be dedicated--that, having come together for a dedication, the 

collection of people at Gettysburg are obliged to accomplish that task. The task that he proffers, however, is 

not capable of accomplishment at the ceremony itself. Lincoln poses a task that must occupy the audience 

beyond the ceremony. The speech, therefore, refuses to permit the ceremony to be a consummation, refuses 

to make it whole and complete. The speech rejects the ceremony as a vehicle of fulfillment. It does so by 

beginning its focus on the “consecration” sense of dedication, transforming it to the “commitment” sense 

and, in the process, shifting its subject, and it ends by rendering the dedicatory ceremony itself into the 

“message” sense. 

The inconclusiveness of the ceremony—Lincoln’s refusal to allow it to consummate the mourning of the 

dead—is entailed by the first sentence of the speech (2-3). The first reference to a dedication appears there. 

The subject of that dedication is, of course, the country, but its object is the statement of a cynosure, a 

proposition that can be taken only as teleological, the enunciation not of a fulfillment, but of a quest. 

CONTEXT 

We are taught to think of discourses dialectically. We understand them in contexts: denying, qualifying, 

echoing, contesting other discourses. Discourses are participatory, and we comprehend them through their 

genealogy and genus. Edward Everett’s oration at Gettysburg echoes Daniel Webster’s epideictic mode; its 

set-piece on the battle aspires to Livy, with brushstrokes of Periclean melancholy. Everett’s speech is in a 

grand ceremonial tradition, and it is through that tradition that we apprehend it. Its relationship to a family of 

other discourses is apparent, and even predictable. 

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is unique in that instead of springing from a chorus of discourses that 

comprise its context, it grows from silence. The Address imposes its own order without reference to any 

other text. 10 It achieves whatever tension it requires not by its collision with alternatives, nor by its 

juxtaposition with precedents, but by its deliberate opposition to the occasion that prompted it. Instead of 

rejecting an implicit contradiction of itself, the Address rejects its own ostensible purpose: In so detaching 

itself from its own grounding, the speech gains a functional autonomy It makes itself incommensurable. Its 

sole alternative is not a contravening utterance, but a mortuary quietude. 

There is a recording of a 1944 performance by Wilhelm Furtwängler of the Freischütz overture. The 

opening chord of the overture—a long bass crescendo—seems to swell up out of nothing. It begins so quietly 


that one’s first hearing is not of a chord beginning to be played, but of an already playing chord slowly 

developing into audibility. And part of the effect that Furtwängler creates in his miraculous performance is a 

consciousness of the void that has preceded the music. It is as if silence itself had found a voice. The 

Gettysburg Address constructs a similar effect in its course. Unlike the subtle efflorescence with which 

Furtwängler performs Weber’s chord, the Address begins with a magisterial pronouncement on history; but it 

then proceeds so to disengage itself from other utterance that it ends finally as an articulation within 

nonbeing. It does not grow from a void; rather, it grows a void around itself. The speech presents itself sui 

generis. 

There is one other analogy to be drawn between the Furtwängler performance and the Gettysburg 

Address. The way in which Furtwängler has his orchestra voice the first chord anticipates his interpretation 

of the whole composition. His entire performance is a playing out of the urgency and mystery that are coiled 

in that opening chord. The whole is implicit in its genesis. Similarly, the Gettysburg Address is an exfoliation 

of its first sentence. The threads of Lincoln’s tapestry are all plaited into that initial statement: the themes of 

religiosity, of historic continuity, of birth, of temporal movement, of the organic nation, of location, of 

dedication, and of unfulfilled aspiration. The whole of the discourse is a weaving of those threads. 

NEGATIVITY 

The negativity of the Address is striking: We cannot dedicate this cemetery. We resolve that the dead shall 

not have died in vain, that people’s government shall not perish. All are negatives. How curious that a speech 

should so powerfully survive, should so capture the popular imagination, should be marked as the greatest 

effusion of eloquence in the history of the country, and yet it is not cast affirmatively; rather, it denies, it 

disclaims, it negates. 

Along with the sure sense of what he knows and does not know, Lincoln also sustains in the speech a 

sense of the limits of language. The deeds of the soldiers are far more important than the speeches of the 

dedicators (10-15); the will and intention of people is superior to what is said (15-18). The speech evokes a 

sense of human effort transcending verbal expression, a sense of life and history eluding utterance. This 

aspect of the speech can be equated with mysticism: with the conviction that there are realities beyond the 

powers of articulation, ineffable forces that shape our lives. 

Without any overt allusion to a religious idea, without any invocation of the deity, Lincoln still manages 

to give his remarks a religious aura. The initial source of that aura is the biblical idiom of the first sentence, 

but its continuing source is the reflexive undercurrent in the Address: its contemplation of how unimportant 

and transitory speaking itself is (10-14), and of the fact that there are things not entailing speech--sentiments, 

intentions, resolutions, collective actions, values, ideals--that are important and enduring (15-23). The first 


half of that message by itself--that the occasion is a fugitive moment--would be a message of humbling 

disenchantment; but the second half of the message--that some noble deeds and some dispositions of 

consciousness are beyond language--redeems the moment by embedding utterance within a nimbus of 

silence. 

The negativity of the Address is also an expression of its profound conservatism. The first sentence 

having announced the historical founding of a destiny, the speech serves the perpetuation of that original 

purpose. It refuses digressions. Like Lincoln’s presentation of the government’s role in the Civil War itself, 

the Address is concerned, most notably in its first and last sentences, with the conservation of a political idea 

and with the republic that instantiates it. Therefore, the Address would deny their alternatives. 

Grammatically, the concluding lines (22-23) are negative, but they negate an extinction, and so situate 

themselves as a nay-saying that affirms. 

The end of the Address is a resolution (20) that the establishment described in the first sentence will not 

be terminated: “we here highly resolve.” There is more than a single sense in which one may “highly 

resolve” something. One sense has to do with “resolve” in its sense of “making independently visible.” In 

that meaning, a high resolution may refer, for example, to a photograph that clarifies different colors and 

volumes. Insofar as that sense of “highly resolve” is among its overtones, the phrase inclines the auditor to 

understand resolving “that these dead shall not have died in vain” to constitute a clarity of disclosure--a 

resolution that we not only undertake but also one that we behold with a new precision--a statement of the 

essence not only of the speech up to that point, but also of its occasion and, beyond them both, of its living 

subject, the nation. The second sense--obviously closer to the center of Lincoln’s intention--is a use of the 

term “highly” to suggest loftiness, intensity, solemnity, nobility. Such attributes of our “resolve” elevate the 

dignity of the promise that the deaths will be purposeful. And there is a reason, even beyond the intrinsic 

sobriety of the task, to make such a resolve most solemn. 

In calling for the resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, Lincoln is summoning his audience to 

perform an act of redemption: a redemption of the dead. To suggest that it is for us to redeem the dead could 

easily be construed as a sacrilege. The redemption of the dead, after all, would be regarded by Lincoln~ 

contemporaries as a divine prerogative. Lincoln is advancing a secular version of redemption in the only way 

in which he tactfully can, and that is by the indirection of a negative construction. For him to have put the 

idea in a positive mode would have been too stark a revelation of his work to sanctify the nation and its 

defining principles. 

Suppose the speech were not rewritten, but simply rearranged so that it ended with an affirmative 

statement. Suppose that, by more clearly echoing the beginning of the speech at its end, the rearrangement 

transmuted the Address into “that most pervasive of all rhetorical figures in ancient literature and even in 

modern, the ring-composition.’’ 11 Suppose the last few lines went: 


. . . 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 government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the 

earth—and that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. 

No reader of this rearrangement who has had a lifetime’s memory of the Gettysburg Address can quite 

renounce the influence of the original. Yet, even after the most earnest deference to the probability of 

prejudice, the suspicion persists that the rhythm of the conclusion is debased by the rearrangement. The 

revision is too brusque. It is a terminus, but it is no longer a coda. It has gained positive declaration at the 

cost of majesty. The original ending has a tetrad of phrases, each composed of a tetrad of beats—“of the 

people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish” —followed by a single, emphatic, unaccented triad: 

“from the earth.” The rhythmic indeterminacy of the rearranged ending must compare unfavorably to this 

solemn cadence, which measures out the final lines (20-23) with a gravity corresponding to their determinacy 

of purpose. 

USES OF 1RONY 

The Gettysburg Address is a sacramental act. Its procedure is to abjure its own efficacy. It is through the 

process of that abjuration that it achieves its character. The speech affirms by negating; it makes itself into an 

eloquent confession of inarticulateness; it gains celebrity by seeking obscurity; it commemorates the dead by 

obligating the living; it masters an occasion by retreating from it, and culminates a dedication by protracting 

it. 

The speech abounds in ironies, in transformative disruptions of convention. And that condition of 

multifaceted reversal is itself a composite irony because its source is the head of a government who is 

resisting a rebellion. In rotating a meaning into its opposite, an irony is a miniature verbal revolution, and so 

it is supremely ironic to use irony in resistance to a revolution. 12 Lincoln at Gettysburg pre-empted the 

essential tool of his adversaries, whose most penetrating minds were less penetrating than his, and whose 

most agile wits were, compared to his wit, cumbrous. 

DIANOIA AND ETHOS 

It is only after one has recovered from the spell of the speech, and comes to realize that it is, after all, the 

product of a mind, that the character of that mind can be considered. On its most superficial level, the speech 


is asymptomatic. It is inexpressive. It displays nothing of the speaker except his mighty powers of 

comprehension, but even that display seems inadvertent. That is, the speech proposes no more of the mind 

behind it than any speech—even the most spontaneous imaginable—necessarily proposes. The plays of 

Shakespeare reveal little of the attitudes of Shakespeare; but they reveal abundantly that the magnitude of his 

mind was beyond measure. By contrast, the Gettysburg Address does reveal some of the attitudes of Lincoln 

simply because, unlike the multifarious voices of a Shakespearian drama, its voice is the distinctive voice of 

its author, but the design of the Address distances the personality of Lincoln. The subordination of the 

occasion to historic considerations perforce subordinates also the orator—subordinates him to the point of 

invisibility. Lincoln does not intrude into the Gettysburg Address. He is not a reference in the speech, not 

literally, not even by specific implication. What presence he has in the speech is solely the product of 

linguistic necessity. He is present only to the extent that a speech requires a speaker. 

The Gettysburg Address initiated a process of deliberate self-effacement that Lincoln conducted until his 

death. It was a process that reached its public culmination in the Second Inaugural Address. 

Here is the beginning of the Second Inaugural Address. Forget for a moment Lincoln’s reputation as an 

orator. Attend instead to the tortured construction of the language: 

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an 

extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be 

pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public 

declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which 

still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be 

presented.... On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously 

directed to an impending civil war.... While the inaugural address was being delivered from this 

place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city 

seeking to destroy it without war... 

Lincoln was a masterly stylist; yet, these are curiously strained sentences, their contortion exacerbated by 

their presence in a speech with some of the most magnificent passages in the history of the language. Those 

beginning sentences are bent and twisted to avoid self-reference. During an inauguration—an occasion when, 

of all occasions, attention would be invited to the person who is the subject of the ceremony—Lincoln labors 

to escape being present in his speech. 

The Second Inaugural Address has only two uses of the first-person singular, both in the same sentence: 

“The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, 

and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.” The context of “myself’ is a disclaimer of 

special knowledge, and the context of “I trust” is, in effect, a disclaimer of superior knowledge. “I trust” also 


etards and enhances the rhythm of the sentence. None of these functions exalt the speaker. The implicit 

disclaimers, in fact, signal his humility. In this speech, as in the precursive Gettysburg Address, Lincoln had 

so refined his vision of his role and had so purified his expression of that vision, that he had all but 

extinguished his own authorial presence. 

The rigor of Lincoln’s self-discipline is given salience by its contrast to Everett’s expansive speech. 

Everett reconstructed the battles of Gettysburg and, beyond them, a sufficient sampling of the history of 

warfare to subsume them to a heroic perspective. It was a virtuoso performance, inhibited by neither timidity 

nor reticence. The echoes of Everett’s ambitious narrative had not wholly faded when the laconic Lincoln 

spoke what he knew. 

The Gettysburg Address is, finally and inevitably, a projection of Lincoln himself, of his discretion, of 

his modesty on an occasion which invited him to don the mantle of the prophet, of his meticulous measure of 

how far he ought to go, of the assurance of his self-knowledge: his impeccable discernment of his own 

competence, his flawless sense of its depth and its limits. As an actor in history and a force in the world, 

Lincoln does not hesitate to comprehend history and the world. But he never presumes to cast his mind 

beyond human dimensions. He does not recite divine intentions; he does not issue cosmic judgments. He 

knows, to the bottom, what he knows. Of the rest, he is silent. 

NOTES 

2 Edgar Lee Masters, Lincoln, The Man (New York: Dodd-Mead, 1931) esp. 478-498. Masters argues, in this angry biography, that 

Lincoln hypnotized the country, to its ruin. 

3 Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) 145-147. 

4 Early reception of the Gettysburg Address is surveyed by William E. Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg: What He Intended to Say; 

What He Said; What He was Reported to Have Said; What He Wished He had Said (New York: Peter Smith, 1950) 89-92 and 114- 

123. Other initial responses to the Gettysburg Address, pro and con, have been collected by Svend Petersen, The Gettysburg 

Addresses: The Story of Two Orations (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing (1963) 53-64. Petersen has also collected parodies of 

the Address, pp. 65-94. They are uniformly dreary. 

5 Wills’s admirable Lincoln at Gettysburg is the most recent and arguably the most accomplished effort to scale the summit of the 

Address. Wills has anchored virtually every word of the Gettysburg Address to its historical antecedents in a meticulous 

documentation of its sources, its context, and its effects. Yet, not even Wills’s excellent book has said all that there is to say about 

the construction and dynamics of the text. Nor, indeed, does it claim to. 

6 Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1954) 92: “... respirational values.., refer to our 

feelings of liberation, of freedom from heaviness, and to the illusion of soaring into harmonious relations with sky and horizon.” 

7 Barton observed the absence from the Address of the first-person singular in Lincoln at Gettysburg, 149. In comparing Lincoln~ 

selfless performance with later speeches given at Gettysburg by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Barton is surprised to 

find that Roosevelt was, like Lincoln, “wholly impersonal.” Wilson, however, referred to himself more than once a minute. See 

Barton 149-151. 

8 It is reasonable to suspect that the namesake of Abraham was especially attentive to those passages in the King James Bible that 

discussed Abraham. For example, Genesis 16:16 reports: “And Abram was fourscore and six years old, when Hagar bare Ishmail to 


Abram.” In Genesis 17:5 God issues a directive: “Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; 

for a father of many nations have I made thee.” For “brought forth,” see Genesis 1:20 and 1:24. 

9 See, for example, Job 18:17: “His remembrance shall perish from the earth, and he shall have no name in the street.” And Job 

34:14-15: “If he set his heart upon man if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together, and man 

shall turn again unto dust.” Also John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever 

believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” 

10 There are textual antecedents for the Address, but the Address contains no references to them. Lincoln had long been contending 

that slavery could not be contained, that ultimately it would have either to be universal or wholly abolished. See, for example, his 

“House Divided” Speech to the Republican State Convention, Springfield, Illinois, 16 June 1858, esp.: “I believe this government 

cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” 

Lincoln had also advanced juridical arguments on the indivisibility of the nation, most notably in his First Inaugural Address, 4 

March 1861, esp.: “I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.” 

In his Message to Congress of 4 July 1861 Lincoln argued that the attack on Fort Sumter presented issues of principle that 

transcended even the nation: 

It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy--a government of the 

people, by the same people--can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the 

question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, according to organic law, in any 

case, can always, upon the pretences made in this case, or on any other pretences, or arbitrarily, without any pretence, break up 

their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. 

Lincoln already had the germs of his conclusion (“government of the people, by the same people” and “an end to free government 

upon the earth”) over two years before the Address. 

11 Roger A. Hornsby, “The Relevance of Ancient Literature: Recapitulation and Comment,” Papers in Rhetoric and Poetic, ed. 

Donald C. Bryant (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press: 1965) 95. 

12 There was in Lincoln’s day, as there is now, a common distinction between the terms “rebellion” and “revolution.” Webster~ 

Third New International Dictionary quotes Instructions for Government of U.S. Armies: “The term ‘rebellion’ is applied to an 

insurrection of large extent, and is usually a war between the legitimate government of a country and portions or provinces of the 

same who seek to throw off their allegiance to it and set up a government of their own.” The same source defines “revolution” as “a 

fundamental change in political organization or in a government or constitution.” 

Lincoln merged the two conceptions in the final section of the Gettysburg Address. He made the effect of the rebellion to be 

revolutionary. Its success, he was saying, would extinguish the form of government entailed in the genesis of the nation, a claim he 

had warranted in earlier discourses. See, for example, the Message to Congress of 4 July 1861.

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