"Liberal education ought to be less a matter of becoming well read than a matter of learning to read well, of acquiring arts of awareness, the interpretative or "trivial" arts. Some works, written by men who are productive masters of these arts, are exemplary for their interpretative application. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is such a text, and the following reading did indeed begin as an exercise in a language tutorial in Annapolis. But although an exercise, it was never the less done on the hypothesis essential to liberal study: that what the author wrote then might be true even now.
It is probably best to begin by observing what is most obvious about this "Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg" (p. 734)—its brevity. It consists of ten sentences, which can be spoken in a little over two minutes. We know from Lincoln himself that he chose his format quite deliberately. When Everett generously wrote to him; "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes," Lincoln answered, "In our respective parts yesterday, you could not have been excused to make a short address, nor I a long one" (p. 737).
Edward Everett had been chosen to be the main speaker at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, on ground bought by the eighteen Northern states which had lost men in the battle there. Lincoln, as chief of state, had been invited only two weeks before the ceremony. Everett courteously sent Lincoln his own two-hour speech, composed in the classicizing style for which he, a professor of Greek, was famous, so that Lincoln could consider it in writing his own. We might then expect Lincoln's speech to be composed as a counterpoise to Everett's; in fact, it seems to be a tacit and tactful repudiation of the classical rhetorical tradition, not only in style, which is (in contrast to Everett's Latinate dactyls) English and iambic, but in a deeper way. For Everett's speech was explicitly modelled on Pericles's Funeral Oration as given by Thucydides, but Lincoln can be contrasted with Thucydides's Pericles precisely as an American with an Athenian statesman, as a republican leader with an oligarch, that is, as a political teacher with a master manipulator…"
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Armand
adds artillery to his soft-plastic Union forces.
