Edward Everett’s Gettysburg Address

When the crowd came to Gettysburg in November 1863 to commemorate the battle fought there 4 months earlier, they came to hear a series of speeches about the Civil War and the events of that battle. And although President Lincoln himself was coming to deliver remarks, he was not in fact the keynote speaker. 

Instead, the man chosen to give the keynote speech was Edward Everett (April 11, 1794 – January 15, 1865), a politician and educator from Massachusetts. Everett served as both a U.S. Representative and U.S. Senator, and he was also the 15th Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to Great Britain, and United States Secretary of State. By the Civil War, he was considered perhaps the greatest orator in the nation, making him a natural choice to be the featured orator at the dedication ceremony of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg in 1863.

Everett is still known today for his oratory, but more for the fact that he spoke for over two hours at Gettysburg, immediately before President Lincoln delivered his immortal two-minute Gettysburg Address. Everett immediately recognized the genius in Lincoln’s speech, writing to the President, "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.” Perhaps Lincoln’s most impressive feat is that he was able to convey so much with so few words; after Everett spoke for hours at Gettysburg, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address only took a few minutes, but in those few minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, ensure that democracy would remain a viable form of government, and would also create a unified nation in which states' rights were no longer dominant. And yet, despite the speech's prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, the exact wording of the speech is disputed. The five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address differ in a number of details and also differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech.

This edition of Everett’s Gettysburg Address is specially formatted with pictures of Everett, pictures of Lincoln at Gettysburg, pictures of Lincoln’s speech, and pictures of the crowd.