Gettysburg Address: Smallpox, Everett's Two Hours and Five Manuscripts

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On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln was asked by organizer David Wills only to offer a few appropriate remarks at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, where the July battle had produced more than 50,000 casualties. The main speaker, former Harvard president Edward Everett, spoke for two hours and more than 13,000 words. Lincoln, who felt weak and dizzy and developed fever and headache on the train home, is believed by clinicians to have been in the early stage of smallpox, and he delivered 271 words in about two minutes.

Scholars debate whether the speech echoes Pericles' funeral oration or the King James Bible, and its definition of government of, by and for the people has roots in Theodore Parker, Daniel Webster and Lajos Kossuth. Reactions ranged from reverent silence to scattered applause, and partisan papers split, with the Chicago Times calling it dishwatery. Only two photographs show Lincoln there, one by David Bachrach identified in 1952, and 3D analysis suggests the platform stood at the Evergreen Cemetery fence rather than the Soldiers National Monument.

The story that Lincoln told Ward Hill Lamon the speech would not scour is considered unreliable.
William Rathvon, a boy who stood 15 feet from Lincoln, recorded his memories on a record in 1938.
A Harrisburg newspaper retracted its negative 1863 review in 2013, on the 150th anniversary.
Five handwritten copies exist, and the Bliss copy is the version carved into the Lincoln Memorial.
The phrase under God is missing from the earliest drafts but appeared in reporters' dispatches, suggesting Lincoln added it while speaking.

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