Garry Wills once wrote that "all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address," which was read aloud by a bareheaded man, exhausted and ill, before a black-suited crowd 150 years ago. Mr. Wills chose the right word: "descends." Lincoln's speech is the pinnacle of American civic utterance. His words honoring the dead at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, do what words are only rarely able to do. They invoke an eloquent silence.
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Most of us recall the momentous phrases in this short, simple speech. But other words and phrases are doing work that is nearly as important. "Now," Lincoln says, "we are engaged in a great civil war." It is "now" that resonates. So does the word "here." Lincoln uses it eight times, seven in the last paragraph: the brave men "who struggled here," the living crowd that is "dedicated here" to finishing the work of the honored dead, and we who "here highly resolve" that this nation shall not perish from the earth.
There is an overpowering immediacy in these plain words. They root Lincoln's more expansive rhythms to the moment, insisting, as we listen, on where we are as much as why we have gathered. All these years later, those words, "now" and "here," work to place us on that field that November afternoon. So much of what we feel about Lincoln still arises from this speech. There is no false modesty in his sense of insufficiency, only respect for the dead on both sides of that battle. He embodies the very premise of his speech — that only the dead can consecrate the ground at Gettysburg — by making his speech so short.
For many of us, almost everything we think about the Civil War, about the "new birth of freedom" it was meant to bring, is merely an extension of Lincoln's words. That, perhaps, is what Lincoln understood best as he began to talk that afternoon. He was there not only to speak our thoughts aloud but to give them language so moving that they could continue to resound all these years later. And so they still do.
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