The Real Lincoln

The True History of the Famous Gettysburg Speech – A Surprising Revelation

This article appeared in The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, Nebraska) on September 9, 1887, written by Ward H. Lamon. Ward Lamon was the personal bodyguard of President Abraham Lincoln, and in 1872 published the book The Life of Abraham Lincoln; From his Birth to his Inauguration as President. In late 1887 Lamon was looking for a publisher of his manuscript for a “second volume” but in despair decided to sell the manuscript, the rights to the 1872 volume and materials he had purchased from Herndon. Negotiations of a sell fell through and Lamon had success in offering a series of articles about Lincoln to various newspaper publishers.

Among the many historic scenes in which President Lincoln was an actor there is not one, perhaps, where a single incident gave rise to a flood of misrepresentation s groundless and so gross as his justly celebrated Gettysburg speech. Since his death there has been an enormous expenditure, not to say a very great waste, of literary talent on that performance, as there has been on about everything else he did, or was supposed to have done, from his boyhood until the moment of his assassination. The reporters, critics, chroniclers, eulogists, flatterers and biographers have not only failed to give a true account of that famous speech, but they have subjected Mr. Lincoln’s memory to a hurtful misrepresentation, it is the purpose of this paper to show.

It was my good fortune to have known Mr. Lincoln long and well – so long and intimately that as the shadows lengthen and the years recede I am more and more impressed with the rugged grandeur and nobility of his character, his strength of intellect and singular purity of heart. Surely I am the last man on earth to say or do aught in derogation of his great worth, or to tarnish his fair name in any way whatever.

The world has long since conceded that he was great in all the elements that go to make up human greatness. He had a stamp of originality that was entirely his own. With his unique individuality, his intellect, at once strong, sagacious and profoundly acute and critical, were associated a mental integrity and moral purpose as firm as granite, a thorough knowledge of himself, and a modesty that scorned both self laudation, and eulogy by others for fame or achievements not his own. An act accomplished by him either in his character of citizen or public servant he regarded more as a duty discharged than as an achievement of which to be proud. He was charitable to a fault, and yet no man ever discriminated more narrowly in his judgment concerning the acts and motives of other men, or had a keener appreciation of merit or demerit in others. With his characteristic honesty and simplicity we may well suppose that, were he alive today, he would feel under little obligation to the swarm of fulsome eulogists who have made up the body of the current chronicles of his life and public conduct – many of these writers being men who, while Lincoln lived, exhausted the resources of their venom and skill in detraction and abuse.

Discriminating observers and students of history have not failed to note the fact that the ceremony of Mr. Lincoln’s apotheosis was not only planned but executed by men who hated him while he lived, and after the deification took place, with showy magnificence, some time after the great man’s lips were closed by death. These same flatterers who have undertaken the self imposed task of guarding the memory of the man whom they were traducing and trying to supplant at the moment when the assassin’s bullet closed his career, now demand that his true friends shall do homage to him, not as a great and good man, but as a god.

An honest man of the present day who dare not deify him for meritorious things which he did, much less for things he left undone, is set down as no friend to Mr. Lincoln. The maxim – “Nothing extenuate, nor aught set down in malice,” is entirely ignored and the true nobility of his character is sacrificed by falsely ascribing to him ornamental virtues which he never possessed, and motives, purposes and achievements which he would promptly disown if he were alive. These later eulogists have tried the extremes of unmanly detraction while their hero lived, and meaningless flattery and deification after his death. These slaves of chance seem to have lost sight of the man altogether; the man they hated, the god they salute with hosannas still more hurtful to his fame.

Although more godlike, I readily concede, than any man I ever say, Mr. Lincoln was yet thoroughly human; and although the writers of whom I speak have signally failed in that respect I yet believe it quite possible to separate the acts of the man from the man himself. To do this is precisely what Mr. Lincoln would desire at the hands of any man who ventures to sit in judgment upon his public or private conduct.

A day or two before the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg Mr Lincoln told me that he would be expected to make a speech on the occasion; that he was extremely busy, with no time for preparation, and that he greatly feared he would not be able to acquit himself with credit, much less to fill the measure of public expectation. From his hat (the usual receptacle of his private notes and memoranda) he drew a page of foolscap, closely written, which he read to me, first remarking that it was a memorandum of what he intended to say. It proved to be in substance, and I think in haec verba, what was printed as his Gettysburg speech.

After its delivery he expressed deep regret that he had not prepared it with greater care. He said to me on the stand, immediately after concluding the speech, “Lamon, that speech won’t sour. It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed.” He seemed more than ordinarily concerned about what the people would think of it. I was deeply impressed by his frank and regretful condemnation of the effort, and especially by his manner of expressing that regret; and my own impression was deepened by the fact that the orator of the day, Mr. Everett, and Mr. Seward both coincided with Mr. Lincoln in his unfavorable view of its merits.

The occasion was solemn, impressive and grandly historic. The people stood spell bound, it is true. The vast throng was hushed and awed into silence while Mr. Lincoln read his brief address; but it seemed that his silence and attention to his words arose more from the solemnity of the ceremonies and the awful scenes which gave occasion to them, than from anything the president said.

On the platform from which Mr. Lincoln made his address, and only a moment after its conclusion, Mr. Seward turned to Mr. Everett and asked him what he thought of the president’s speech. Mr. Everett replied; “It was not what I expected from him. I am disappointed.”

In his turn Mr. Everett asked; “What do you think of it, Mr. Seward?” The response was, “He has made a failure, and I am sorry for it. His speech is not equal to him,” Mr. Seward then turned to me and asked, “Mr. Marshall, what do you think of it?” I answered, “I am sorry to say it does not impress me as one of his great speeches.”

In the face of these facts it has been repeatedly published that his speech was received with great éclat by the audience; that amid the tears, sobs and cheers it produced in the excited throng the orator of the day, Mr. Everett, turned impulsively to Mr. Lincoln, grasped his and and exclaimed, “I congratulate you on your success!” adding in a transport of heated enthusiasm,, “Ah! Mr. President, how gladly would I give all my hundred pages to be the author of your twenty lines!”

All this unworthy gush, it is needless to say, is purely apocryphal. Nothing of the kind occurred. It is an afterthought; mere rhetorical bombast, gotten up to serve the purpose of baseless adulation. It is a slander on Mr. Everett, and injustice to Mr. Lincoln and a falsification of history. Mr. Everett could not have used the words attributed to him in the case of his openly expressed condemnation of Mr. Lincoln’s speech, without subjecting himself to the just charge of being a today and hypocrite, and he was neither the one nor the other.

As a matter of fact Mr. Lincoln’s great Gettysburg speech fell on the vast audience like a wet blanket. At the time his reputation was confessedly on the wane. The politicians of the country – those of his own party together with the large majority of the press – were casting about for an available candidate to be his successor, while a great majority of the people were for him.

I state it as a fact, and without fear of contradiction, that this famous Gettysburg speech was not received or commented upon with anything like hearty favor by the people, the politicians, or the press of the United States, until after the death of its author. Its marvelous perfection its intrinsic excellence as a masterpiece of English composition seem to have escaped the scrutiny of the most scholarly critics and the wisest heads of that day on this side of the Atlantic. That discovery was made, we must regretfully own, by distinguished writers on the other side, The London Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Edinburgh Review, and other European journals, were the first to discover, or at least to proclaim, the classical merits of the Gettysburg speech.

It was then that we began to realize that it was indeed a masterpiece; and it then dawned upon many minds that we had entertained an angel unaware, who had left us unappreciated.

The tragic death of Mr. Lincoln brought a more fearful panic to his former traducers than his friends. The latter’s legacy was deep sorrow, mourning and regret; the former were left to the humiliating necessity of a change of base to place themselves en rapport with the millions who mourned the loss of their greatest patriot and statesman. In no country, and in no age of the world, has the death of any man caused and outpouring of sorrow so universal. Every nation of the earth felt and expressed its sense of the loss to progressive civilization and popular government. In his life and death thoughtful men, in all lands, found an inspiring theme.

England’s greatest thinker, John Stuart Mill, pronounced him “the greatest citizen, who has afforded a noble example of the qualities befitting the first magistrate of a free people.” The London Times declared that the news of his death would be received through Europe “with sorry as sincere and profound as it awoke in the United States,” and the “Englishmen had learned to respect a man who showed the best characteristics of their race.” The London Spectator spoke of him as “certainly the best, it not the ablest man ruling over any country in the civilized world.”

For using, in his Gettysburg speech, the celebrated phrase, “the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” Mr. Lincoln has been subjected to brutal criticism as well as the most groundless flattery. Some have been base enough to insinuate against that great and sincere man the crime of willful plagiarism; other have ascribed to him the honor of originating the phrase entire. There is injustice to him in either view of the case. I personally know that Mr. Lincoln made no pretense of originality in the matter, nor was he conscious of having appropriated the thought of the words of any other man.

If he be subject to the charge of plagiarism so is the great Webster, who used substantially the same phrase in his celebrated reply to Hayne. Each may have acquired the peculiar form of expression (the thought itself being as old as the republican idea of government) by the process known as unconscious appropriation. Certain it is that neither Webster nor Lincoln originated the phrase. Let us see how the case stands:

In the preface of the old Wickliffe Bible, published A.D. 1324, is the following declaration; “This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” which language is identical with that employed by Mr. Lincoln in his Gettysburg speech.

In an address before the New England antislavery convention in Boston, May 29, 1850, Theodore Parker defined democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people, of course.” Substantially the same phrase was used by Judge Joel Parker in the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1853.

A distinguished diplomat has acquainted me with the singular fact that almost the identical phrase employed by Mr. Lincoln was used in another language, by a person “who existence even was not probably known to Mr. Webster, the Parkers, or Mr. Lincoln, and who certainly did not borrow it from them.” On page thirty-one of a work entitled “Geschichte der Schweizerischen Regeneration von 1830 bis 1838, von P. Federsen,” appears an account of a public meeting held in Olten, Switzerland, in May 1830. On that occasion a speaker named Schinz used the following language; “All the governments of Switzerland (referring tot he cantons) must acknowledge that they are simply from the people, by the people and for the people.”

These extracts are enough to show that no American statesman or writer can lay claim to the origin or authorship of the phrase in question. No friend of Mr. Lincoln will pretend that is is the coinage of his fertile brain. As a phrase of singular compactness and force, it was simply employed by him, legitimately and properly, as a fitting conclusion to an address which will live as a model of classic oratory while free government shall continue to be known and revered among men.