The Gettysburg Address may be the most successful failure in the history of public speaking. Although now considered one of America's most significant and inspiring speeches, it left a very different impression when it was first delivered on November 19, 1863. Before the president spoke, the featured speaker, Edward Everett, gave an oration that lasted two hours. In comparison, the two-minute Gettysburg Address must have been embarrassingly brief. When Lincoln returned to his seat, he sensed the disappointment and called the speech "a flat failure" (Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years, 445). His critics agreed. The Chicago Times derided the president's "silly, flat and dishwatery utterances" (MacKinlay Kantor, Gettysburg, 181).

The consensus of history, however, is that the Gettysburg Address is neither flat nor silly. Even its supposed weaknesses turn out to be strengths. Its brevity lends weight to every word, and it is not only brief, but simple, with a succession of ideas as powerful and inevitable as the cannon blasts that had echoed through Gettysburg four months before. In that succession of ideas, Abraham Lincoln portrays the Civil War as a necessary continuation of America's struggle for independence. For the Gettysburg Address begins not with a eulogy of buried soldiers, but with a reminder of America's founding.

"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." With these words, the Gettysburg Address accurately summarizes America's founding ideas. America's pursuit of independence sprang from a belief in two self-evident truths, articulated in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson: "that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." These self-evident truths ran counter, however, to the equally evident reality of slavery. Slavery was a terrible example of oppression and prejudice that contradicted the Declaration of Independence's promises of liberty and equality. This blatant contradiction was permitted because "the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed diametrically opposed to remaining a united nation" (Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers, 108). The issue was simply too divisive to be raised, let alone resolved. However, the fault lines of inconsistency and prejudice only widened over time, and in just four score and seven years they had torn the nation apart.

Abraham Lincoln began the Gettysburg Address with a reminder of America's origins because he saw a clear link between America's founding and the historic events of his own day. As the speech unfolds, Lincoln reveals a sweeping vision: the "honored dead" died not just for a strategic point on a general's map, but for the life of an entire nation; a nation that was demonstrating to the ages that "any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." The battle at Gettysburg - indeed the entire war - was a test of the values that the Declaration of Independence embraced. By putting the war in that historical perspective, Abraham Lincoln made America's founding ideas the motivation to "be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced." The encouragement was desperately needed. The North was war-weary, discouraged by Confederate victories and a list of casualties that grew daily. Members of the anti-war faction of the Democratic Party, called Copperheads, were calling for reconciliation with the Confederacy. Abraham Lincoln refused to consider this. He knew that capitulation would betray America's founding ideas, and that the task of bringing those ideas to life was not yet done.

Nor was that task finished when the Civil War was won. One hundred years later, when the battle for civil liberties was raging, Martin Luther King Jr. opened his famous "I Have a Dream" speech with the words, "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation." His tribute to Abraham Lincoln's legacy, like the opening of the Gettysburg Address, shows the power of remembering America's history and the great men and ideas that have determined it. The words of the Gettysburg Address, and the actions of the man who spoke them, were inspirations to the civil rights movement during the struggle for yet another "new birth of freedom."

Today, the Gettysburg Address continues to fill our hearts with a desire "to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us." For the work of preserving America and furthering the principles she was founded on will never be finished. It is a task to which each generation must dedicate America anew. The tendency to grow weary of our responsibilities, and discouraged by the challenges we face, makes the preservation of liberty and unity a constant struggle. That is why the Gettysburg Address will never lose its relevance for Americans.

Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." It is ironic, in retrospect, that such famous words should put such little faith in speeches' power, and urge us instead to remember the courageous actions and great thoughts of the past. Retrospect has also made us more aware of the Gettysburg Address's value: as a fine speech, as the legacy of a legendary president, and as a reminder of America's history. The speech that some feared was a failure is now a national treasure, a beautiful reminder of our glorious cause.