lincoln delivered the gettysburg address to

They converged on the small town of Gettysburg for the event. HOLZER: There were hundreds of dead animals, probably thousands of dead horses and then add to all of that the heat of the Pennsylvania summer, really made the town almost unbearable and people walked around with scented handkerchiefs over their noses for months.Īnd the odor apparently lingered into the winter, long past the day this ceremony took place.īLOCK: On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln rose before the crowd, 10 maybe 20,000 people. HAROLD HOLZER: It is almost inconceivable to think of what that area was like over the miles square that this battle took place in.īLOCK: That's Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. Bodies of Union soldiers that had been hastily buried in makeshift field graves were being reinterred in the new cemetery and carcasses of dead horses were still strewn all over the battlefield. When Lincoln spoke, it was more than four months after that battle.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.īLOCK: Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, more than 50,000 dead and wounded. It took Lincoln just two, maybe three minutes to deliver with interruptions for applause. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.īLOCK: It's a speech of remarkable brevity, about 270 words. Would he formally consecrate the National Cemetery at Gettysburg with a few appropriate remarks? Lincoln's speech, delivered 150 years ago, the Gettysburg Address, is, of course, now considered among the most famous in U.S. That was the invitation extended to President Lincoln. This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

Lincoln delivered the gettysburg address to