150 Years On

How Abraham Lincoln Wrote the Gettysburg Address

‘Four score and seven years ago...’ Martin P. Johnson, the author of Writing the Gettysburg Address, remember the first words of the iconic speech delivered 150 years ago today, and the battlefield visit that brought unexpected revisions to the text.




The same powerful emotional impulse prompted him to add the words “under God” to his speech when they are not found in his written delivery text. (Because of him, “under God” is incorporated in the Pledge of Allegiance today.) Over the days of writing and revision, he had found the words and come to a text that proclaimed his own dedication to the survival of the democratic government with freedom and equal rights for all, the “new birth of freedom.” Here on the platform, to safeguard and assure the highest ideals he held, Lincoln reached for the highest authority he could envision. It was the culminating change to his written words while speaking, Lincoln’s final creative impulse of that moment of power and truth at Gettysburg, an act that both reaffirmed and radically redefined the work of the Founding Fathers.

At first only some of those who witnessed and participated in the day expressed a sense of the emotional power of the scenes that unfolded before them. Over time, the legend grew in schoolrooms, from pulpits, and in the pages of the daily press. Even a century later, it was continued from the steps of Lincoln’s temple by a prophet named King who still had a dream. But it began in a historical event whose reality resides in the details and trivia of a moment. The Gettysburg Address made the battlefield and the cemetery into landmarks of American memory, but it was Lincoln’s own journey to Gettysburg that made the Gettysburg Address.