Two hours, two minutes: the speech nobody came to hear

For three days in July 1863, the armies of the Union and the Confederacy fought around the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. When it was over, thousands of soldiers lay in hastily dug graves across the fields and hillsides.

By the autumn, a group of Northern states had bought land on Cemetery Hill to give the Union dead a proper resting place. The new Soldiers’ National Cemetery was to be dedicated on 19 November 1863, and the organisers wanted the occasion to match the scale of the loss.

The star of the day

They invited Edward Everett to give the main address. Everett had been a congressman, governor of Massachusetts, president of Harvard and Secretary of State. Above all, he was famous as an orator — one of the best-known speakers in the country, at a time when long speeches were a form of public entertainment.

Everett asked for more time to prepare, and the date was set around his schedule. He studied the battle carefully, walked the ground and wrote a detailed account. On the day, he spoke for about two hours, largely from memory: roughly 13,000 words covering the battle, ancient funeral customs and the history and politics of the war.

It was, by the standards of the time, a fine speech. The audience of thousands — many of them standing — listened through it.

A few appropriate remarks

President Abraham Lincoln had been invited almost as an afterthought, to make “a few appropriate remarks” formally setting the ground apart. After Everett finished, a hymn was sung. Then Lincoln stood up.

He spoke for about two minutes. Five handwritten copies of the address are known, and they differ slightly; the version most often reproduced, the so-called Bliss copy, is 272 words long. Some people in the crowd reportedly barely realised he had begun before he had finished. A photographer setting up his equipment is said to have missed the moment entirely.

Not written on the back of an envelope

A popular legend says that Lincoln scribbled the address on the back of an envelope on the train to Gettysburg. Historians at the Library of Congress and elsewhere have found no evidence for it. The two earliest known drafts, kept by his secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, suggest that Lincoln began writing in Washington, partly on official stationery, and revised the text in Gettysburg the night before and possibly on the morning itself.

Lincoln also kept working on the words afterwards. In the months that followed he wrote out further copies by hand for charitable causes and admirers, adjusting a phrase here and there. The final version, written in 1864 for Colonel Alexander Bliss, the stepson of the historian George Bancroft, to be reproduced in a fund-raising book, is the only copy Lincoln signed and dated, and the one most often quoted today.

The sound of it

The speech was written to be heard, outdoors, by a large crowd with no microphones. That shaped its music. It is full of short groups of three, the rhythm speechwriters call a tricolon: “we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground”. It ends on the most famous of them: “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

Patterns like these help a listener hold on to an idea without seeing the text. They are also why so many people who have never read the address can still recite its closing line.

What the newspapers said

Reactions split along political lines. The Chicago Times, hostile to Lincoln, called his words “silly, flat and dishwatery utterances”. Other papers were moved. The Springfield Republican in Massachusetts called the address a perfect gem, and predicted it would repay further study.

Everett himself had no doubt. The next day he wrote to the president:

Lincoln answered the same day with typical modesty: “In our respective parts yesterday, you could not have been excused to make a short address, nor I a long one.”

What short does

It is tempting to read the story as a simple lesson that short is good and long is bad. But Lincoln’s address is not memorable just because it is short. Plenty of short speeches are forgotten the same afternoon. It works because of how much each sentence carries.

The historian Garry Wills, whose book Lincoln at Gettysburg won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, points out how the speech moves through time in just three paragraphs: the founding of the nation “four score and seven years ago”, the war being fought now, and the task still ahead. There is no list of battle details, no names, not even the word “Gettysburg”. There is nowhere for a listener’s attention to drift.

• It starts with a frame everyone recognises — the nation’s founding — before saying anything new.
• It repeats a few strong words (“dedicate”, “nation”, “people”) instead of introducing many.
• It ends on the one thing the audience is asked to do, not on a summary of what was said.

A prime minister’s memo

The pressure to be brief tends to grow when time is short and the stakes are high. On 9 August 1940, in the middle of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill sent a memo to his War Cabinet titled simply “Brevity”. It is now held at the National Archives in Kew.

Churchill asked for reports to set out the main points in short, crisp paragraphs, to move detailed material into appendices and to drop padded phrases. He added that the discipline of setting out the real points concisely would also prove an aid to clear thinking. The memo itself fits comfortably on one page.

Short takes longer

Writing briefly is usually harder than writing at length. Two centuries before Gettysburg, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal ended one of his Provincial Letters (1657) with an apology to his reader: he had made the letter longer than usual only because he had not had the time to make it shorter.

Many people recognise the feeling from their own work. A long email is often a first draft that was sent. A short one has usually been through the slow, uncomfortable process of deciding what really matters and letting the rest go.

The question worth asking

The next time you write something important — a message to your team, a note to a friend, a speech at a family gathering — it is worth asking Lincoln’s question rather than Everett’s. Not “how much can I say?”, but “what is left when I take out everything my reader does not need?”

Everett gave the crowd everything he knew. Lincoln gave them one idea they could carry home. More than 160 years later, it is still the one people learn by heart.