98 Fun Facts About Gettysburg Address

One week after the Gettysburg Address, Americans marked which holiday, newly proclaimed for the whole nation by Lincoln?

Thanksgiving. Urged on by the magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, Lincoln had proclaimed it for the last Thursday of November 1863, which fell a week after he spoke at Gettysburg on November 19.

Roughly how many words long is the Gettysburg Address?

About 270. Lincoln needed roughly two minutes to say them, after the day's main orator had held the same crowd for two hours.

The Address honoured Union soldiers who had turned back which Confederate general's invasion of the North in July 1863?

Robert E. Lee. Three days of fighting cost the two armies around 50,000 casualties, and on the Fourth of July Lee began leading his beaten army back to Virginia.

Lincoln's opening, 'Four score and seven years ago', reaches back to which founding document?

The Declaration of Independence. Eighty-seven years before 1863 is 1776, and Lincoln chose to date the nation from its claim that all men are created equal rather than from the Constitution.

In the Address's opening sentence, Lincoln calls the United States a new nation 'conceived in' what?

Liberty. Lincoln pictures the nation as a living thing, 'conceived' and 'brought forth', so that the war becomes a test of whether it will survive or 'perish'.

In the Address, what did Lincoln predict the world would 'little note, nor long remember'?

What we say here. Lincoln added that the world 'can never forget what they did here', yet his own short speech became one of the best-known ever given in the United States.

Why was the Gettysburg cemetery's dedication put back by almost a month from its first planned date?

The orator needed more time. Edward Everett said he could not be ready by October, so the organisers moved the day to suit him and only afterwards invited Lincoln to add a few remarks.

Three years before sharing the Gettysburg platform with Lincoln, Edward Everett lost the 1860 election for which office?

Vice President. Everett was John Bell's running mate on the Constitutional Union ticket that Lincoln beat, yet once the war came he threw himself behind the Union and backed Lincoln's re-election in 1864.

Who invited Lincoln to Gettysburg, asking him to set apart the grounds 'by a few appropriate remarks'?

David Wills, the local lawyer who organised the cemetery, put Lincoln up the night before the ceremony, and the president finished revising his speech in an upstairs bedroom of the house.

Under which famous Pennsylvania politician had Lincoln's Gettysburg host studied law?

Thaddeus Stevens, by then a leading anti-slavery congressman, paid for it that summer: Confederate cavalry burned his Pennsylvania ironworks on their way to the battle.

What illness was Lincoln probably coming down with when he gave the speech?

Smallpox. His doctors called it a mild 'varioloid', but the illness lasted three weeks, and a 2007 medical review argued it was the full disease, played down to reassure the public.

Which member of Lincoln's cabinet travelled with him to Gettysburg and addressed a crowd there the night before?

William Seward. When serenaders called for a speech that evening Lincoln said only a few words, so they moved on to hear his Secretary of State, whom Lincoln then visited before finishing his own text.

Which country's constitution adopts Lincoln's phrase 'government of the people, by the people, for the people' as the republic's principle?

France. It wrote the line into its post-war constitution of 1946, in the article that sets out the flag, the anthem and the national motto, and kept it there when the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.

Which copy is regarded as the standard text because Lincoln titled, signed and dated it?

Bliss. Lincoln wrote it out only because his previous attempt, on both sides of one sheet, could not be reproduced for a fundraising book, so this last copy got the care the others lacked.

Where is the signed copy that Oscar Cintas left to the nation now displayed?

The Lincoln Room of the White House. Cintas's will left the manuscript to the American people on condition that it be kept at the White House, which is why it alone of the five copies is not in a library.

How much did Oscar Cintas pay for the signed copy at auction in 1949, then a record for a document?

$54,000. No document had fetched more at a public auction, and when the collector died eight years later he left his prize to the American people.

What gas fills the sealed cases protecting the two earliest copies at the Library of Congress?

Argon. The inert gas pushes out the oxygen that would slowly eat at ink and paper, and when the cases are off display they sit in a low-temperature vault built for the Library's greatest treasures.

Which two-word phrase is missing from the Nicolay and Hay drafts but present in the later copies?

Under God. At least three reporters telegraphed the words that same afternoon, so Lincoln seems to have added them as he spoke, a rare ad lib that he then wrote into every later copy.

Which university holds the Bancroft copy, the only one privately owned?

Cornell. Lincoln filled both sides of the sheet, so it could not be reproduced for the charity book and Bancroft simply kept it; a couple who later bought it gave it to the university in 1949.

Which state library holds the Everett copy?

Illinois. When the copy came up for sale at $60,000, the state's schoolchildren gave most of the money in small donations and the Chicago businessman Marshall Field III covered the rest, bringing it to Lincoln's home state in 1944.

The Bancroft copy was requested by George Bancroft, known as the father of what?

American history. His ten-volume History of the United States earned him the title, and in 1866 Congress chose him to deliver its memorial address on the murdered Lincoln.

Near its close, the Address resolves that the nation shall have 'a new birth of' what?

Freedom. Lincoln was asking for more than the old Union restored: the soldiers' deaths were to buy a nation remade, ten months after his Emancipation Proclamation.

What stationery was the first page of the Nicolay copy written on?

Executive Mansion letterhead. The first page is in ink on the president's official stationery, but the second is in pencil on plain lined paper, which suggests he finished the ending after leaving Washington.

Which 1906 bestseller helped spread the myth that Lincoln dashed off the Address on the train to Gettysburg?

The Perfect Tribute. Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews's story sold 600,000 copies and was set reading for generations of pupils, yet Lincoln's steady handwriting in every draft points to a desk, not a jolting railway car.

Garry Wills compared the Address to a speech by which ancient Athenian statesman?

Pericles. The parallel is with his funeral oration for Athens's war dead, yet on the day it was the main orator who quoted Pericles by name, while Lincoln's own text mentions no Greek at all.

Historians hear the King James Bible's 'threescore years and ten' in 'Four score and seven'; which book is that phrase from?

Psalms. Psalm 90 puts a human life at 'threescore years and ten', or 'fourscore' for the strong, which is why historians hear Scripture in Lincoln's very first words.

Which abolitionist minister's line on democracy 'by all the people' did Lincoln mark in pencil?

Theodore Parker. Lincoln's law partner William Herndon brought the Boston preacher's sermons back from a trip east, and recalled that Lincoln marked the line and 'in substance afterwards used' it at Gettysburg.

Which senator's 1830 'Second Reply to Hayne' described government 'made for the people, made by the people'?

Daniel Webster. Lincoln thought the reply to Hayne 'the grandest specimen of American oratory', his law partner recalled, and called for a copy when he sat down to write his own first inaugural.

Thanking Everett for his praise, Lincoln wrote that he was pleased 'the little I did say' was 'not entirely a' what?

Failure. Everett had wished he had come as near the heart of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln did in two minutes; Lincoln answered that Everett could not have given a short address, 'nor I a long one'.

Which newspaper called the speech 'silly, flat and dishwatery utterances'?

Chicago Times. The Democratic paper was so hostile to the war effort that a Union general had shut it down that June, and it was Lincoln who had the order revoked.

Which paper formally retracted its 1863 dismissal of the speech on the 150th anniversary in 2013?

The Patriot-News of Harrisburg. Its 2013 editorial began 'Seven score and ten years ago', called its forebears' verdict of 'silly remarks' a judgment 'so flawed, so tainted by hubris', and signed off: 'The Patriot-News regrets the error.'

Which senator said in his 1865 eulogy of Lincoln that 'the battle itself was less important than the speech'?

Charles Sumner. Speaking in Boston that June, the Massachusetts senator gave his reason in the next breath: 'Ideas are always more than battles.'

By legend, Lincoln said his speech, like a bad plow, would not do what?

Scour. In the tale Lincoln adds that 'the people are disappointed', but it rests largely on a companion's recollections, printed some thirty years later, and the historian Garry Wills calls them unreliable.

Josephine Cobb, working at which institution, found Lincoln in a Gettysburg crowd photograph in 1952 by enlarging a mislabeled negative?

The National Archives. Cobb guessed that the tallest flag marked the speakers' platform and enlarged the plate again and again until a bare-headed Lincoln appeared, nearly ninety years after the day.

Which news agency's reporter, Joseph Gilbert, transcribed the speech in shorthand?

Associated Press. Gilbert's shorthand report went out by telegraph that afternoon, which is why the version newspapers printed differs in small ways from every copy in Lincoln's own hand.

William Rathvon, the only Gettysburg eyewitness known to have left an audio recording, recalled Lincoln arriving at the cemetery how?

On a gray horse. Rathvon, then a small boy, wriggled to within fifteen feet of Lincoln and heard every word, yet admitted that, 'boylike', he could not recall any of it afterwards.

Inside the Lincoln Memorial, the Gettysburg Address is carved opposite which other speech by Lincoln?

His second inaugural address. Given a month before the war ended, its 'with malice toward none' faces the Gettysburg Address across the hall: one speech on why the war was fought, the other on how to end it.

Which president had Ted Sorensen study the Gettysburg Address before drafting his inaugural?

John F. Kennedy. Sorensen reported back that Lincoln never used two or three words where one would do, and the short, plain-worded 1961 inaugural he then helped draft was built on that rule.

Which 1963 speech echoes the Gettysburg Address's first words with its early line 'Five score years ago'?

I Have a Dream. Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and he borrowed Lincoln's cadence to recall the Emancipation Proclamation, signed a century earlier.

A National Park Service marker places the 1863 speakers' platform over the fence in which private Gettysburg cemetery?

Evergreen. The Soldiers' National Monument was long taken for the spot, but photographs from the day put the platform beside or across the fence, in the town's own older burial ground.

Which state's 1975 Gettysburg memorial honors 'her son' Lincoln and says he spoke where the Soldiers' National Monument stands?

Kentucky, where Lincoln was born. Its plaque says he 'delivered his immortal address at the site now marked by the soldiers' monument', the very claim that a newer Park Service marker nearby contradicts.

The Union dead at Gettysburg lie in a great semicircle around a central point, grouped by what?

State. The designer, William Saunders, gave every state a wedge of the same half-circle around one central monument and set officers beside enlisted men, so that no grave outranks another.

Lincoln said the dead of Gettysburg had given 'the last full measure of' what?

Devotion. The reburials had barely begun: only about a third of the 3,500 Union dead were in their new graves when Lincoln spoke, and the work went on until the following March.

Oscar Cintas, who left the signed copy to the nation, had been which country's ambassador in Washington?

Cuba. Cintas made his fortune in sugar and railroads, and after his death his estate endowed fellowships for artists of Cuban descent.

In the Address, 'we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate', and we can not do what else to 'this ground'?

Hallow. Lincoln's reason follows at once: 'the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here' had already consecrated the ground 'far above our poor power to add or detract'.

Which filmmaker's 2014 documentary The Address follows Vermont schoolboys learning to recite the Gettysburg Address?

Ken Burns. The boys attend the Greenwood School, a small boarding school for pupils with learning differences such as dyslexia, where each year they memorise the speech and recite it in public.

George Bancroft, who asked Lincoln for the fourth copy, had earlier held which cabinet post?

Secretary of the Navy. He held the post for only about eighteen months under President Polk, long enough to found the Naval Academy at Annapolis.

By legend, Lincoln compared his speech to 'a bad plow' in a rueful aside to whom?

His bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon. He had just introduced Lincoln to the crowd, but the remark rests largely on Lamon's own recollections, printed decades later, and the historian Garry Wills treats them as unreliable.

Which future film mogul dressed up as Lincoln at school to recite the Gettysburg Address?

Walt Disney later created a lifelike mechanical Lincoln, yet chose not to have it recite the address, saying Americans already knew it too well.

Whose pennies and nickels helped buy the Everett copy of the Gettysburg Address for the public in 1944?

Schoolchildren gave their small change toward the $60,000 price of the manuscript, and a gift from Marshall Field III covered the rest.

The Gettysburg Address was read aloud to mark the first anniversary of which national tragedy?

The September 11 attacks were remembered at Ground Zero in 2002 with Lincoln's words, read by Governor George Pataki before the roll of the victims' names.

Which film director gave the keynote at the Gettysburg Address anniversary ceremony in 2012?

Steven Spielberg spoke from the cemetery rostrum days after his film Lincoln opened, and called the address the finest prose poem any American had written.

The Gettysburg Address says the new nation was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are' what?

Created equal is as close as the speech comes to naming its cause: Lincoln never uses the word slavery, and never mentions the battle or either army by name.

Roughly how long did Lincoln take to deliver the Gettysburg Address to a crowd of some 15,000?

About two minutes was enough: Edward Everett, who had spoken at far greater length, wrote next day that he wished he had come as near the central idea.

Which country star read the Gettysburg Address on a 1972 concept album about America's past?

Johnny Cash recited it on America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song, an album that also has songs about Paul Revere, the Alamo and the Battle of New Orleans.

The Gettysburg Address ends with the vow that government by the people 'shall not perish from' what?

The earth are the last words Lincoln spoke that day, closing a single final sentence that makes up nearly a third of the whole speech.

Peter Norvig's famous satire retells the Gettysburg Address in the style of which office software?

PowerPoint made the joke easy: Norvig wrote that the program's own wizard supplied the garish slides almost unaided, and he added a pointless graph of 'four score and seven years'.

Edward Everett, the featured speaker at Gettysburg, had earlier been president of which university?

Harvard made Everett its president in 1846, a job he quickly came to dislike after serving as a governor and as American minister to Great Britain.

The Gettysburg Address asks its listeners to 'highly resolve that these dead shall not have died' how?

In vain is how the deaths would stand if the war were lost, so Lincoln turned a burial ceremony into a call to see the fight through.

Which Union general, appointed only three days earlier, won the battle the Gettysburg Address honours?

George Meade was handed the Army of the Potomac on the eve of the fighting and beat back the invasion, though Lincoln fretted that the enemy was then allowed to slip away.

Which nation's 1947 constitution has a preamble inspired by the closing phrase of the Gettysburg Address?

Japan's postwar charter was written largely by American officials during the Allied occupation, and its preamble echoes Lincoln's three-part formula about the people.

Which Lincoln measure of January 1, 1863, the year of the Gettysburg Address, declared slaves in rebel areas free?

Emancipation Proclamation was the order's name; it also opened the Union army to Black recruits, and nearly 200,000 Black men served by the war's end.

William Saunders, designer of the cemetery Lincoln dedicated at Gettysburg, introduced which fruit to America?

The navel orange was the best-known import of Saunders, a federal horticulturist; before the speech he showed Lincoln his plan of the graves, which Lincoln called admirable.

Who, in the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address, 'brought forth on this continent, a new nation'?

Our fathers was Lincoln's phrase for the founding generation, and one scholar hears in those two words an echo of the Lord's Prayer.

Which industrialist, a wartime railroad official, falsely claimed he gave Lincoln the pen for the Gettysburg Address?

Andrew Carnegie's boast is one of several myths about the speech; Harriet Beecher Stowe wrongly insisted that Lincoln composed it in only a few moments.

John Nicolay and John Hay, namesakes of the two earliest Gettysburg Address drafts, served Lincoln as what?

Private secretaries Nicolay and Hay both travelled to Gettysburg with Lincoln, and years later the pair wrote a multi-volume biography of him together.

Which Chinese revolutionary based his 'Three Principles of the People' on the Gettysburg Address's closing phrase?

Sun Yat-sen went to school in Hawaii, where he came to admire Lincoln, long before he led the revolution that ended imperial rule in China.

Which neighbouring farm owner gave the keynote at the 1963 centennial of the Gettysburg Address?

Dwight Eisenhower commanded an Army tank training camp at Gettysburg in 1918, and later retired to a farm beside the battlefield.

Which American composer's Lincoln Portrait of 1942 has a narrator speak lines from the Gettysburg Address?

Aaron Copland wrote it when a conductor commissioned a musical portrait of an eminent American, and its narrators have included Marian Anderson and Henry Fonda.

Garry Wills's 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg, a study of the famous address, won which nonfiction award?

Pulitzer Prize judges honoured it in 1993; Wills argued that the speech was no hasty scribble but had been painstakingly crafted over a period of weeks.

Which military ensemble travelled from Washington to play before Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address?

The Marine Band, called 'The President's Own' since Thomas Jefferson's day, played before the main speech, and its leader Francis Scala was with Lincoln that day.

The Gettysburg Address says the Civil War is 'testing whether that nation' can 'long' do what?

Endure is the word that ends the second sentence, the only place where Lincoln names the conflict, calling it simply 'a great civil war'.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln calls the act of dedicating the cemetery 'altogether fitting and' what?

Proper it may have been, but Lincoln's next words turn the speech around: 'in a larger sense', he says, those present cannot dedicate the ground at all.

Edward Everett, the main speaker at Gettysburg, gave a touring lecture in the 1850s to help save which estate?

Mount Vernon was saved partly by Everett's lecture on George Washington: he gave away the proceeds, about $70,000, and refused even to deduct his travel costs.

Roughly how many casualties did the two armies suffer in the battle whose dead the Gettysburg Address honours?

About 50,000 men were killed, wounded, captured or missing in three days, more than in any battle Americans had fought before.

William McDougall, Lincoln's guest on the trip to Gettysburg in 1863, later helped found which nation?

Canada counts McDougall among the founders of its 1867 Confederation; he had come to Washington to renegotiate a trade treaty when Lincoln invited him along.

Why could Lincoln's fourth handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address not be used in a fundraising book?

Written on both sides of the paper, it proved unusable, so the historian who had asked for it was allowed to keep it and Lincoln wrote out a fifth and final copy.

In the Gettysburg Address, who does Lincoln say must 'be dedicated here to the unfinished work'?

Us the living is Lincoln's turn from mourning to duty; he uses the word 'living' twice in the speech and never once says 'I'.

The Gettysburg Address says part of the battlefield is being set aside 'as a final' what for the fallen?

Resting place was the plain truth: on the day Lincoln spoke, reburials had only begun, and only about a third of the Union dead lay in their new graves.

The Gettysburg Address honours the men who died at Gettysburg so 'that that nation might' do what?

Live completes the speech's imagery of birth, life and death: the nation is 'conceived' and 'brought forth' like a child, and men die so that it may go on.

The Everett copy of the Gettysburg Address was the guarded centrepiece of a Lincoln exhibit at which 1964 event?

New York World's Fair visitors found it in a special alcove watched by troopers, with every known photograph of Lincoln displayed nearby.

William Herndon, who lent Lincoln sermons echoed in the Gettysburg Address, was his partner in which profession?

The law bound Herndon and Lincoln together in a Springfield practice; Herndon recalled bringing sermons and lectures for Lincoln to read and return.

Which director's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has a boy read the Gettysburg Address aloud at the Lincoln Memorial?

Frank Capra has James Stewart's newly arrived senator stop to watch as the child, helped by his grandfather, reads the carved words.

Lincoln says the soldiers consecrated the Gettysburg ground 'far above our poor power to add or' what?

Detract closes Lincoln's most modest line: the men who struggled on the field, he says, have already done what no ceremony or speech could.

Edward Everett's Gettysburg oration likened the fighting to ancient battles, including which Greek victory of 490 BC?

Marathon suited Everett's classical style; he went on to argue that enemies in earlier civil wars, such as England's Wars of the Roses, had managed to reconcile.

Which historian, a star of PBS's The Civil War, called applause for the Gettysburg Address delayed and scattered?

Shelby Foote's verdict is disputed: the governor of Pennsylvania, who sat on the platform, remembered a hushed crowd and a speech everyone called impressive.

Which wartime Pennsylvania governor pushed for the Gettysburg cemetery and sat on the platform as Lincoln spoke?

Andrew Curtin was the principal force behind the cemetery, and it was through his agent in Gettysburg that Lincoln was persuaded to attend the dedication.

Lincoln copied out the Gettysburg Address for a book of authors' autographs sold at a charity bazaar in which city?

Baltimore's sanitary bazaar, held for Union soldiers and sailors, was to sell the book, Autograph Leaves of Our Country's Authors, to raise money for the troops.

The Springfield Republican, which printed the Gettysburg Address in full, praised it as 'a perfect' what?

Gem was the verdict of the Massachusetts paper, which found the speech tasteful and elegant in every word and comma and predicted it would repay further study.

Which scientific body, hailed by Neil deGrasse Tyson, did Lincoln charter in the year of the Gettysburg Address?

National Academy of Sciences was the Lincoln legacy Tyson chose to praise when he was asked to write about the speech for its 150th anniversary.

How was Lincoln's contribution listed on the printed program for the Gettysburg cemetery ceremony in 1863?

Dedicatory Remarks, by the President, came sixth on the bill, after music, a prayer, more music, the main speech and a hymn.

The Gettysburg Address speaks of 'the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly' what?

Advanced is Lincoln's reminder that the war was not won: when he spoke, the fighting had almost a year and a half left to run.

Near its end, the Gettysburg Address urges Americans to be dedicated to 'the great' what 'remaining before us'?

Task is the word on which the final sentence turns, opening a chain of four resolutions that runs unbroken to the speech's last word.

Which English actor recites the Gettysburg Address in a saloon as a valet out West in 1935's Ruggles of Red Gap?

Charles Laughton's valet stands up and delivers the whole speech from memory after none of the Americans in the bar can recall a word of it.

An unproven claim traces the Gettysburg Address's 'of the people, by the people' to which medieval Bible translator?

John Wycliffe is often credited with the phrase in the prologue to his 1384 Bible, but scholars have found no evidence that it appears there.

Which Hungarian revolutionary's 1852 speech to Ohio lawmakers is thought to have influenced the Gettysburg Address?

Lajos Kossuth told the legislature that the spirit of the age was democracy, 'all for the people, and all by the people'; Lincoln had once organised a celebration in his honour.

Montgomery Blair, one of three cabinet members who travelled to Gettysburg with Lincoln, held which office?

Postmaster General Blair had earlier served as counsel for Dred Scott, the enslaved man whose claim to be free reached the Supreme Court.

Edward Everett spoke before Lincoln at Gettysburg; roughly how many words long was his seldom-read oration?

About 13,600 words made Everett's speech the main event of the day, in an era when lengthy orations at cemetery dedications were the fashion.