Lincoln’s Wit/Wisdom 366

The principal speaker at the November 19, 1863 ceremony dedicating the Gettysburg cemetery was Edward Everett from Massachusetts. As an afterthought the organizers invited Lincoln ‘to make a few appropriate remarks.’ From Lincoln’s perspective, the dedication of this cemetery offered him the opportunity to lay out succinctly the North’s war aims – to explain why all these dead had not died in vain. This opportunity was particularly appealing in that virtually every Northern governor would be in attendance, and such a grouping, at that time, was a rarity indeed.