Those Words Arrived a Hundred Years Later

The child listens; the parent reads. This page is here so you can answer the questions that come after the story. The script itself is available from the transcript button during playback.

What this covers

These are the words the story sets up for the child, in the story's own wording. A national cemetery is a place where a country lays to rest the people who died serving it. A dedication is a day when people stand together and set a place apart, from now on, for one special use. The Declaration of Independence is the paper America wrote when it became a country, to say what kind of country it meant to be. Equal means that every person counts just as much as every other. A proposition is a statement you test to see if it is true.

The subject is the short speech Lincoln gave on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg. The story answers three things — what he said, what the moment was like, and what the words came to mean.

The axis is the third one. At Gettysburg Lincoln brought the Declaration of Independence back to life, but the words did not take hold. According to a study summarized in a review essay, the meaning of the speech was not properly recognized until the 1960s; for the hundred years before that, his words were "ignored, deflected, misappropriated, faintly echoed, selectively quoted, and misleadingly praised" (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.38.1.06). The honest conclusion is not "a great speech changed a country" but "it took a hundred years for those words to have real power." This is neither hero worship nor cynicism.

What actually happened

• In July 1863 there was fighting at Gettysburg for three days, with more than fifty-one thousand casualties (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.16.1.08). A soldiers' national cemetery was built on the site and dedicated on November 19; seventeen acres were set apart as a final resting place (DOI: 10.1353/cwh.1955.0004).
• Lincoln was invited as an afterthought. The committee debated whether he could speak fittingly at all, and only two weeks before the ceremony decided to ask him for "a few appropriate remarks." Edward Everett, the main speaker, was the unopposed choice of seventeen state governors, and he even set the date, asking for more time to prepare (DOI: 10.1353/cwh.1955.0004).
• About fifteen thousand people are thought to have come. The night before, the town overflowed; torches burned along the streets and there was music and singing. Lincoln stayed in a house in town, came out briefly when the crowd called for him, said a few words, and went back in (same paper).
• The speech is the shortest of Lincoln's public addresses. It opens: "Four score and seven years ago … dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." He then said the war was testing whether a nation so conceived could long endure, and that they had come to dedicate part of that field as a resting place for those who gave their lives so that the nation might live (DOI: 10.1017/cbo9781139034784.033).
• It closes: government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. One paper notes that Lincoln did not say "in this country" but "from the earth" — as though the whole history of liberty rested on this one young republic (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.22.1.03).
• One book records that Black workers took part in building the cemetery. The same book records that Black volunteers were turned away from the army when the war began (DOI: 10.5771/9780810883376).

Questions your child may ask

"So the speech changed everything?" Not that day. One newspaper objected at once that the president had leaned on the Declaration rather than the Constitution. The New York Times said nothing about the speech for three years and only began praising it in 1869 (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.38.1.06). Another study argues the speech did not become widely known until 1876 or later, and that after Lincoln's death it was the Emancipation Proclamation that was more widely celebrated (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.29.2.06).

"Then when did the words matter?" At the 1963 centennial in Gettysburg, people pulled the same speech in different directions: toward reconciliation, toward Cold War pride, and toward unfinished business (DOI: 10.5325/pennhistory.91.2.0231). One reviewer put the irony plainly — in the place where Lincoln proclaimed a "new birth of freedom," African Americans had to struggle to realize emancipation's promise (DOI: 10.1353/soh.2023.0096).

On 28 August of that year, Martin Luther King, Jr., described a dream of racial equality "deeply rooted in the American dream." One paper records that for the inspirational texts of that speech King drew upon the Bible, the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address (DOI: 10.1353/aq.1996.0043). ⚠️ The source names all three side by side, and its verb is "drew upon" — do not harden it into "quoted the Gettysburg Address." What Lincoln brought back to life at Gettysburg, King picked up a hundred years later, together with Lincoln's own words. The axis rests on two independent sources — this direct statement, and the 1960s account below.

The study summarized in that review essay points to the 1960s as the moment the speech was properly recognized — the era when "all men are created equal" was finally written into law (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.38.1.06).

"Didn't he write it on an envelope on the train?" There is no evidence for it — though "no evidence" and "false" are not the same thing. Even people on that same train disagree: some swore they saw him writing on a scrap of paper, others swore he wrote nothing the whole way (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.16.1.08). A book that studied the speech for years answers the question of when he wrote it plainly: we do not know. The envelope story is one historians set aside long ago (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.29.2.06). The story calls it "a story people wish were true."

"What was the Emancipation Proclamation? What happened to Lincoln?" The Proclamation came in January of the same year, and Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, after the war ended. Neither is in the story; both belong to a different axis. One study notes that Lincoln was not a national hero while he lived, and that his writing was reread and reassessed only after the assassination (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.34.1.03). Paperis has a separate adult piece, "Why the Emancipation Proclamation Came When It Did," that follows the Proclamation date by date.

"How could he write like that with no schooling?" His formal schooling adds up to less than a year. After he learned to form letters at seven, he wrote them with charcoal, in the dirt, in the sand, in the snow — anywhere a line could be drawn. Around forty, riding the court circuit, he carried Euclid's geometry in his bag and worked through the proofs by a single candle while the room slept. The same paper finds the result of that study in the speech's phrase "dedicated to the proposition" (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.3.1.04).

What is evidence and what is a story that gets told

Well established — the July 1863 battle and the casualty figure, the November 19 dedication, Everett as the main speaker, the text of the speech, and the muted immediate response.

Where scholars divide — what the speech actually did. One scholar holds that the speech raised equality into a new American commitment and remade the country. Another rejects that directly: the words did not do that, he asks, and how could a speech do it when it was not even heard clearly on the day (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.29.2.06). This piece takes neither side and stops at what both sides share — the words had no power on the day.

Kept to the margin — (a) who spoke longer (Everett two hours, Lincoln two minutes, DOI: 10.1353/cwh.1955.0004) and (b) the gap between the written draft and what he actually said. (b) is not in the script at all. One paper argues that a more symmetrical shape emerged as he delivered it, and that he kept that new shape in the official text (DOI: 10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.2.0317). Interesting, but not the axis — that is a story about the record, not about what the words were and what they did.

Deliberately left out — the course of the battle, bodies and wounds, and the work of building the cemetery. The setting is a burial ground, and the story does not build a place for a child to be frightened; the casualty figure appears exactly once. The weather, the faces, and the crowd's reaction are also absent — the sources contradict each other. Some swore he spoke from memory without once glancing at his pages; others described him reading it word for word.

Left out for lack of evidence — the famous letter in which Everett is said to have told Lincoln that two minutes came nearer the occasion than his own two hours, and the figure "272 words." Neither appears anywhere in the 34-paper shortlist.

Things to try together

• Trace the hundred-year gap together — Lincoln on 19 November 1863, and King on 28 August 1963.
• Take a short piece of writing and read it with the first part removed. What changes is exactly what "selectively quoted" means.