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The Gettysburg Address
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🫀 Five doors into this text
- 📖 What's the story behind this? Four months after the three-day battle at Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), the town was still burying the dead. Lincoln was invited almost as an afterthought to say 'a few appropriate remarks' after the main two-hour oration. He spoke for about two minutes. Ask Davee: who was Edward Everett, and what did he write to Lincoln the next day?
- 🎨 What could we draw, paint, or create? Draw the field as Lincoln saw it that November morning — the low hills, the new graves, the crowd. Or draw one phrase: 'a new birth of freedom.' What does a birth of freedom look like?
- 🎵 Could we sing it? Every word, sung — first the way 1863 would have sung it (a parlor ballad with a brass band in the distance), then in the genres you pick. Same words, so the tune brings them back. Hear it sung →
- 🪶 A line worth remembering: '…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' (chapter 3, verse 5). Learn the last sentence first; the rest hangs from it.
- 🌿 Get outside and experience part of it: Walk a cemetery, a veterans' memorial, or a flag at half-staff. Stand still for the two minutes the speech took. Read the last sentence out loud there. If you can get to a battlefield park, do the whole text at the spot where it was spoken.
It's on your shelf — read & listen right here, or grab a physical copy from Abraham Lincoln.
About this book
The Gettysburg Address, Bliss copy (the text Lincoln signed and dated, carved in the Lincoln Memorial). Three paragraphs, ten sentences, 272 words, delivered November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery. Read it, listen to it, memorize it line by line - and hear it sung in the music of its own day in Liken Studio.