The Gettysburg Address: Inventing a New Nation

[RS Davis]

[glow=red,2,300]Clyde N. Wilson Wrote:[/glow]One might wonder why this short and rather abstract composition, hardly remarked upon at the time it was given at Gettysburg a few months after the great battle there, has acheived such importance. Part of the answer is surely Lincoln's great rhetorical skill. In the Gettysburg Address (and other orations) he performs successfully the difficult feat of having it both ways. He appears in the famous brief oration as both the conservator of the sacred old Union and the herald of «a new birth of freedom». Rhetorically, he encompasses right and left, the revered past and the longed-for ideal future.

- Rick