Brevity at Gettysburg

I had another blog post simmering in my mind when I read on this morning's Writer's Almanac that on today's date in 1863 Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

Since my visit to the Lincoln Cottage a few weeks ago I've had a deepening appreciation of our 16th president, of his greatness and humility. The cottage on the ground of the Old Soldier's Home in northwest D.C. is where Lincoln wrote much of the Emancipation Proclamation. I don't have time this morning to research his writing of the address. Though reports of his dashing it off on the back of an envelope on the way to Gettysburg have, I believe, been discredited, he didn't have much time to write the speech.

The verifiable information I did learn today was that Lincoln's two-minute speech followed a two-hour oration by Edward Everett, that many in the audience were not aware that the president had spoken because it happened so quickly, and that afterward Everett said to Lincoln: "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."

Brevity is always the harder path to take. I'd like to imagine that Lincoln got to the heart of the matter because he was living with the war, living with it at the White House and living with it at his summer retreat at the Soldier's Home, where as many as 30 fresh graves a day appeared in the president's back yard.

Twenty years ago we visited Gettysburg and I lamented that I had forgotten the words of the address I had to memorize when I was a kid. I could probably recite less of the speech these days than I could even then. But I appreciate it more now.