Gettysburg Address

[maharba]

Seven score and twelve years ago today, Abraham Lincoln gave a 3 minute speech somewhere on the battlefields near a small town in Pennsylvania. The Boritt book cited has that his speech was largely forgotten for a decade or more. Around the time of the forcibly re-United States centennial. I don't think anyone is quite sure, today, just where on the fields that the speeches took place? In glancing back at paper entries, I see very little mention at all of the Gettysburg Address until much closer to 1900. And not the 1876 date, of Boritt. In looking at the Gabor Boritt and Gary Wills books, and others, it seems they have 'discovered' items previously unrecognized in the Gettysburg Address. Wills appears to have made many discoveries on assorted topics, that other experts have taken exception with. "The Kennedy myth exploded", breakthroughs in Catholic doctrine, the 2nd Amendment, and much more. The analogy to Pericles funeral oration was not a discovery but had been published decades before, several times. It doesn't seem to ring true to me, and maybe the suggested Pericles analogy should be forgotten again, for someone later on to discover. Some of the background in Wills book was disturbing, talking about the battlefield and surveying it. Lincoln either went over it, or was shown a map of it. And that Edward Everett looked it over,

"Everett excoriated the rebels for their atrocities, implicitly justifying the fact that some Confederate skeletons were still unburied, lying in the clefts of Devil’s Den."

I knew that Everett and Lincoln came to consecrate and hallow the grounds only for the Union dead, but it shocked me that he actually cursed the fallen Southern soldiers even while seeing their last remains lying unburied. Surely, Everett didn't include that in his long Address.

And in addition to the Psalms 90 'fourscore' reference, I notice this,

1st Chronicles Ch 7 verse 5
And their brethren among all the families of Issachar were
valiant men of might, reckoned in all by their genealogies
fourscore and seven thousand.

I still don't doubt that it was Psalms 90 that the trail of
'fourscore' in books and speeches began, working their way on through into Lincoln's 1863 address. If Lincoln also remembered that Psalm, and in fuller context, could that have played through his mind and into the gist of the speech? Or might Lincoln have spoken to a pastor who suggested that Fourscore analogy to current events (of the day), and set in motion the direction of the speech.