Lead with Wisdom by Mark Strom

Author:Mark Strom
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118637579
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

The Gettysburg Address is one of the classic examples of story-telling in a crisis to galvanise hearts and minds.

Background

It was November 19, 1863. The American Civil War would rage another two years. The occasion was the dedication of the cemetery of those who had died in the bloody Battle of Gettysburg.

Speaking first, Edward Everett had recounted the three-day battle. Lincoln knew he must gain the hearts and minds of his fractured people. And he couldn’t take another two hours.

THE BRAVE MEN, LIVING AND DEAD, WHO STRUGGLED HERE, HAVE CONSECRATED IT, FAR ABOVE OUR POOR POWER TO ADD OR DETRACT.

The partisan audience expected Lincoln to dwell on Northern victory, to take the high moral ground on slavery, and to base his address on the Constitution. But Lincoln honoured all who had fallen, he did not mention slavery directly, and he looked beyond the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence from the English.

Lincoln was powerfully positioning the call to move beyond the current impasses — he achieved this without mentioning them.

The address

Four score and seven 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 battlefield 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 can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not 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 here 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 the earth.

Lincoln’s brilliance

Lincoln’s triumph was his interpretation of the founding stories.

This far removed in history Lincoln’s words loom as one of the great speeches of all time, hugely influential in shaping the nation. But Lincoln had not even been invited. Many only realised he was speaking as he finished and he seemed to have little impact on the crowd.

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