A politician who gets to the point and doesn’t ramble on for an hout listening to the sound of his own voice.
He would never be successful today.
Sure he would. Since his first sentence is a bald face lie, but spoken so smoothly people failed to notice, he'd be a natural lying politician in the USA today.
He deliberately misled people about the 13 slave owning states trying to get their independence from England as being about freedom for slaves, and that is absolutely wrong.
The Declaration of Independence was not about freedom for slaves. It was about Independence from the United Kingdom. Making it about slavery is an attempt to mislead people.
A popular speaker, Edward Everett was the “main” speaker that day. His speech, prior to Lincolns, lasted over two hours. Then Lincoln arose and delivered his immortal, exquisitely germaine address. The newspapers panned it as an insult, but later realized it for the gem that it was.
Eward Everett wrote to Abraham Lincoln on 20 November 1863, a day after the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. Everett had been the primary speaker, but he remarked to Lincoln,
“I should be glad if I could flatter myself, that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”