What makes the Gettysburg Address so famous? It was a very good speech with good points, but it wasn’t 300 words. It isn’t true that Everett’s speech was boring. Senator Edward Everett himself, who gave a two-hour speech before Lincoln’s, understood that the speech was good and wrote Lincoln telling him so. It is true the applause following the speech was a bit scattered people did not expect the speech to be so short, and the audience was taken by surprise. But Lincoln thought most things he did were a failure, so that’s not a good way to judge. We think the speech was a failure because Lincoln thought so. It’s also not true that the speech was a complete failure. It was the fruit of a great deal of thought and issues that he’d been thinking about over a lifetime. It’s not true that Lincoln wrote it on the train to Pennsylvania from Washington, D.C. What are some of the greatest misconceptions about the Gettysburg Address? BrandeisNOW spoke with English professor John Burt, author of the critically acclaimed “Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism,” about the meaning of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln addressed an audience of about 15,000 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery four months after the Union defeated the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. One hundred fifty years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a two-minute speech that became one of the most cherished in American history.
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