Lincoln’s famous address 150 years on
Tuesday, November 19 2013, we celebrate and commemorate America’s 16th president’s address, popularly known as the Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln delivered this speech on November 19 1863 at Gettysburg in southern Pennsylvania, USA. Tomorrow marks 150 years since this imperishable speech was delivered.
It is one of the shortest and most powerful speeches ever delivered in history. It is recorded that Lincoln delivered this speech in less than two minutes. A photographer attempted to take his picture or photo but failed because Lincoln had already finished delivering the speech. The cameras those days were not as advanced as today’s. Every student of public speaking is encouraged to memorise this extraordinary speech.
One striking thing is that the chief speaker of that occasion, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours. Everett, who spoke before Lincoln, was an accomplished man. He was a well-know orator, former president of Harvard, governor of Massachusetts, US senator, diplomat and secretary of State. Yet we still remember and celebrate Lincoln’s two-minute speech delivered at the same occasion. Wow, a two-minute speech versus a two-hour speech!
The speeches were centred on the battle of Gettysburg in southern Pennsylvania, which lasted for three days. There were about 51 000 Union and Confederate casualties and 7 000 people died on this battlefield in early July 1863. Later that year a portion of the battlefield was dedicated as a National Soldier’s Cemetery.
Words are powerful. They can build, inspire or destroy. That is why, 150 years on, we still remember these immortal words of Lincoln. In fact, Lincoln’s two-minute speech has been cast in bronze and placed in a library at Oxford as an example of what can be done with the English language.
In 2008, American President Barack Obama, then a senator, delivered a powerful speech titled ‘Words Matter’. He said: “Don’t tell me words don’t matter. I have a dream—just words, words…”
Indeed, words do matter they can give hope. You just need to find the right words to express your intentions and feelings, word matter. Enrich your vocabulary. You can even study the dictionary alone. Buy a Thesaurus. A thesaurus is a book, more in dictionary fashion, that gives you a number of alternative words and opposites you need. For example, instead of using the over-used word happy, you could use pleased, delighted, content, thrilled, glad, merry or ecstatic.
Lincoln’s famous two-minute speech reads:
Four score and years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth
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—The author is a writer and motivational speaker. You can contact him via stewartchibanda@yahoo.com
