Funny how old “Honest” Abe doesn’t mention that the war was “all about slavery” in his masterpiece speech. I guess the on going draft/race riots will put a damper on fairly tales. Nice speech tough.
620,00 wasted young American lives so that their ancestors could be forever blamed for being racist and privileged....never forgiven for freeing the slaves with their blood.
Since then, many politicians and academics in Britain have classified it as one of the greatest in the history of the English Language. There is a collection of statues in London at Parliament Square near the Houses of Parliament and the Palace of Westminster. Of the eleven statues there, only 2 are non Commonwealth Statesmen, Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln.
The statue was sculpted by Augustus Saint Gaudens and was a gift of the 'American People' made in 1920 after the British made the request for placement at Parliament Square.
On of his more famous admirers, author Garry Wills, wrote:
Lincoln at Gettysburg “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.”
As a speech “for the ages”, the GA was a flowery mission statement no risk speech, non committal and very clever. In the context of November 1863 it was lacking and woefully inadequate. The contemporary critics of that speech were correct.