48 Fun Facts About Gettysburg Address

One week after the Gettysburg Address, Americans marked which holiday, newly proclaimed for the whole nation by Lincoln?

Thanksgiving. Urged on by the magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, Lincoln had proclaimed it for the last Thursday of November 1863, which fell a week after he spoke at Gettysburg on November 19.

Roughly how many words long is the Gettysburg Address?

About 270. Lincoln needed roughly two minutes to say them, after the day's main orator had held the same crowd for two hours.

The Address honoured Union soldiers who had turned back which Confederate general's invasion of the North in July 1863?

Robert E. Lee. Three days of fighting cost the two armies around 50,000 casualties, and on the Fourth of July Lee began leading his beaten army back to Virginia.

Lincoln's opening, 'Four score and seven years ago', reaches back to which founding document?

The Declaration of Independence. Eighty-seven years before 1863 is 1776, and Lincoln chose to date the nation from its claim that all men are created equal rather than from the Constitution.

In the Address's opening sentence, Lincoln calls the United States a new nation 'conceived in' what?

Liberty. Lincoln pictures the nation as a living thing, 'conceived' and 'brought forth', so that the war becomes a test of whether it will survive or 'perish'.

In the Address, what did Lincoln predict the world would 'little note, nor long remember'?

What we say here. Lincoln added that the world 'can never forget what they did here', yet his own short speech became one of the best-known ever given in the United States.

Why was the Gettysburg cemetery's dedication put back by almost a month from its first planned date?

The orator needed more time. Edward Everett said he could not be ready by October, so the organisers moved the day to suit him and only afterwards invited Lincoln to add a few remarks.

Three years before sharing the Gettysburg platform with Lincoln, Edward Everett lost the 1860 election for which office?

Vice President. Everett was John Bell's running mate on the Constitutional Union ticket that Lincoln beat, yet once the war came he threw himself behind the Union and backed Lincoln's re-election in 1864.

Who invited Lincoln to Gettysburg, asking him to set apart the grounds 'by a few appropriate remarks'?

David Wills, the local lawyer who organised the cemetery, put Lincoln up the night before the ceremony, and the president finished revising his speech in an upstairs bedroom of the house.

Under which famous Pennsylvania politician had Lincoln's Gettysburg host studied law?

Thaddeus Stevens, by then a leading anti-slavery congressman, paid for it that summer: Confederate cavalry burned his Pennsylvania ironworks on their way to the battle.

What illness was Lincoln probably coming down with when he gave the speech?

Smallpox. His doctors called it a mild 'varioloid', but the illness lasted three weeks, and a 2007 medical review argued it was the full disease, played down to reassure the public.

Which member of Lincoln's cabinet travelled with him to Gettysburg and addressed a crowd there the night before?

William Seward. When serenaders called for a speech that evening Lincoln said only a few words, so they moved on to hear his Secretary of State, whom Lincoln then visited before finishing his own text.

Which country's constitution adopts Lincoln's phrase 'government of the people, by the people, for the people' as the republic's principle?

France. It wrote the line into its post-war constitution of 1946, in the article that sets out the flag, the anthem and the national motto, and kept it there when the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.

Which copy is regarded as the standard text because Lincoln titled, signed and dated it?

Bliss. Lincoln wrote it out only because his previous attempt, on both sides of one sheet, could not be reproduced for a fundraising book, so this last copy got the care the others lacked.

Where is the signed copy that Oscar Cintas left to the nation now displayed?

The Lincoln Room of the White House. Cintas's will left the manuscript to the American people on condition that it be kept at the White House, which is why it alone of the five copies is not in a library.

How much did Oscar Cintas pay for the signed copy at auction in 1949, then a record for a document?

$54,000. No document had fetched more at a public auction, and when the collector died eight years later he left his prize to the American people.

What gas fills the sealed cases protecting the two earliest copies at the Library of Congress?

Argon. The inert gas pushes out the oxygen that would slowly eat at ink and paper, and when the cases are off display they sit in a low-temperature vault built for the Library's greatest treasures.

Which two-word phrase is missing from the Nicolay and Hay drafts but present in the later copies?

Under God. At least three reporters telegraphed the words that same afternoon, so Lincoln seems to have added them as he spoke, a rare ad lib that he then wrote into every later copy.

Which university holds the Bancroft copy, the only one privately owned?

Cornell. Lincoln filled both sides of the sheet, so it could not be reproduced for the charity book and Bancroft simply kept it; a couple who later bought it gave it to the university in 1949.

Which state library holds the Everett copy?

Illinois. When the copy came up for sale at $60,000, the state's schoolchildren gave most of the money in small donations and the Chicago businessman Marshall Field III covered the rest, bringing it to Lincoln's home state in 1944.

The Bancroft copy was requested by George Bancroft, known as the father of what?

American history. His ten-volume History of the United States earned him the title, and in 1866 Congress chose him to deliver its memorial address on the murdered Lincoln.

Near its close, the Address resolves that the nation shall have 'a new birth of' what?

Freedom. Lincoln was asking for more than the old Union restored: the soldiers' deaths were to buy a nation remade, ten months after his Emancipation Proclamation.

What stationery was the first page of the Nicolay copy written on?

Executive Mansion letterhead. The first page is in ink on the president's official stationery, but the second is in pencil on plain lined paper, which suggests he finished the ending after leaving Washington.

Which 1906 bestseller helped spread the myth that Lincoln dashed off the Address on the train to Gettysburg?

The Perfect Tribute. Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews's story sold 600,000 copies and was set reading for generations of pupils, yet Lincoln's steady handwriting in every draft points to a desk, not a jolting railway car.

Garry Wills compared the Address to a speech by which ancient Athenian statesman?

Pericles. The parallel is with his funeral oration for Athens's war dead, yet on the day it was the main orator who quoted Pericles by name, while Lincoln's own text mentions no Greek at all.

Historians hear the King James Bible's 'threescore years and ten' in 'Four score and seven'; which book is that phrase from?

Psalms. Psalm 90 puts a human life at 'threescore years and ten', or 'fourscore' for the strong, which is why historians hear Scripture in Lincoln's very first words.

Which abolitionist minister's line on democracy 'by all the people' did Lincoln mark in pencil?

Theodore Parker. Lincoln's law partner William Herndon brought the Boston preacher's sermons back from a trip east, and recalled that Lincoln marked the line and 'in substance afterwards used' it at Gettysburg.

Which senator's 1830 'Second Reply to Hayne' described government 'made for the people, made by the people'?

Daniel Webster. Lincoln thought the reply to Hayne 'the grandest specimen of American oratory', his law partner recalled, and called for a copy when he sat down to write his own first inaugural.

Thanking Everett for his praise, Lincoln wrote that he was pleased 'the little I did say' was 'not entirely a' what?

Failure. Everett had wished he had come as near the heart of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln did in two minutes; Lincoln answered that Everett could not have given a short address, 'nor I a long one'.

Which newspaper called the speech 'silly, flat and dishwatery utterances'?

Chicago Times. The Democratic paper was so hostile to the war effort that a Union general had shut it down that June, and it was Lincoln who had the order revoked.

Which paper formally retracted its 1863 dismissal of the speech on the 150th anniversary in 2013?

The Patriot-News of Harrisburg. Its 2013 editorial began 'Seven score and ten years ago', called its forebears' verdict of 'silly remarks' a judgment 'so flawed, so tainted by hubris', and signed off: 'The Patriot-News regrets the error.'

Which senator said in his 1865 eulogy of Lincoln that 'the battle itself was less important than the speech'?

Charles Sumner. Speaking in Boston that June, the Massachusetts senator gave his reason in the next breath: 'Ideas are always more than battles.'

By legend, Lincoln said his speech, like a bad plow, would not do what?

Scour. In the tale Lincoln adds that 'the people are disappointed', but it rests largely on a companion's recollections, printed some thirty years later, and the historian Garry Wills calls them unreliable.

Josephine Cobb, working at which institution, found Lincoln in a Gettysburg crowd photograph in 1952 by enlarging a mislabeled negative?

The National Archives. Cobb guessed that the tallest flag marked the speakers' platform and enlarged the plate again and again until a bare-headed Lincoln appeared, nearly ninety years after the day.

Which news agency's reporter, Joseph Gilbert, transcribed the speech in shorthand?

Associated Press. Gilbert's shorthand report went out by telegraph that afternoon, which is why the version newspapers printed differs in small ways from every copy in Lincoln's own hand.

William Rathvon, the only Gettysburg eyewitness known to have left an audio recording, recalled Lincoln arriving at the cemetery how?

On a gray horse. Rathvon, then a small boy, wriggled to within fifteen feet of Lincoln and heard every word, yet admitted that, 'boylike', he could not recall any of it afterwards.

Inside the Lincoln Memorial, the Gettysburg Address is carved opposite which other speech by Lincoln?

His second inaugural address. Given a month before the war ended, its 'with malice toward none' faces the Gettysburg Address across the hall: one speech on why the war was fought, the other on how to end it.

Which president had Ted Sorensen study the Gettysburg Address before drafting his inaugural?

John F. Kennedy. Sorensen reported back that Lincoln never used two or three words where one would do, and the short, plain-worded 1961 inaugural he then helped draft was built on that rule.

Which 1963 speech echoes the Gettysburg Address's first words with its early line 'Five score years ago'?

I Have a Dream. Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and he borrowed Lincoln's cadence to recall the Emancipation Proclamation, signed a century earlier.

A National Park Service marker places the 1863 speakers' platform over the fence in which private Gettysburg cemetery?

Evergreen. The Soldiers' National Monument was long taken for the spot, but photographs from the day put the platform beside or across the fence, in the town's own older burial ground.

Which state's 1975 Gettysburg memorial honors 'her son' Lincoln and says he spoke where the Soldiers' National Monument stands?

Kentucky, where Lincoln was born. Its plaque says he 'delivered his immortal address at the site now marked by the soldiers' monument', the very claim that a newer Park Service marker nearby contradicts.

The Union dead at Gettysburg lie in a great semicircle around a central point, grouped by what?

State. The designer, William Saunders, gave every state a wedge of the same half-circle around one central monument and set officers beside enlisted men, so that no grave outranks another.

Lincoln said the dead of Gettysburg had given 'the last full measure of' what?

Devotion. The reburials had barely begun: only about a third of the 3,500 Union dead were in their new graves when Lincoln spoke, and the work went on until the following March.

Oscar Cintas, who left the signed copy to the nation, had been which country's ambassador in Washington?

Cuba. Cintas made his fortune in sugar and railroads, and after his death his estate endowed fellowships for artists of Cuban descent.

In the Address, 'we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate', and we can not do what else to 'this ground'?

Hallow. Lincoln's reason follows at once: 'the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here' had already consecrated the ground 'far above our poor power to add or detract'.

Which filmmaker's 2014 documentary The Address follows Vermont schoolboys learning to recite the Gettysburg Address?

Ken Burns. The boys attend the Greenwood School, a small boarding school for pupils with learning differences such as dyslexia, where each year they memorise the speech and recite it in public.

George Bancroft, who asked Lincoln for the fourth copy, had earlier held which cabinet post?

Secretary of the Navy. He held the post for only about eighteen months under President Polk, long enough to found the Naval Academy at Annapolis.

By legend, Lincoln compared his speech to 'a bad plow' in a rueful aside to whom?

His bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon. He had just introduced Lincoln to the crowd, but the remark rests largely on Lamon's own recollections, printed decades later, and the historian Garry Wills treats them as unreliable.