I wish I could take my mother to see the new movie about Lincoln. I’ll never forget the night when we watched the segment of Ken Burns’ “Civil War” that included the Gettysburg Address, and the version Sam Waterston read was somehow different than the one she knew. When it was over, she looked at me and asked, “Did you notice the changes?” All I could do was say “no” and feel slightly abashed, because through all my education I never studied the address in any depth, let alone memorized it like she did, growing up in Springfield, Illinois.
My closest encounter with the speech was in 1988, when I was assigned to cover the 125th anniversary of its delivery for the Voice of America. I drove up from Washington to Gettysburg on a Saturday in November and stood in the freezing rain, worrying about whether my tape recorder was working, while a Lincoln re-enactor recited the address. I didn’t say this in my story because it never would’ve gotten past the editors, but the whole thing seemed a bit cheesy, playing right into the tourist-trap side of the town. Still, just looking at the battlefield and knowing what happened there – right here in the USA – was sobering. So was Vicksburg, which I visited a few years later, looking for the grave of a relative who turned out to be one of the many unknowns.
What I keep thinking about now is how close we still are to those times. My mother was born in 1914, just over half a century after Lincoln left Springfield for Washington. Growing up in his city, in the early 20th century, she lived just down the block from a former slave. Is it any wonder that when she was nearly 80, she remembered every single word of that speech? Or that my wife’s Alabama-born grandfather, reminiscing on a recording made in the 1960s, would talk about how his grandfather died at First Bull Run? That’s not many generations. We know these people.
My mother’s gone now but I’ll think of her and Clark Swan and a lot of other folks when I see “Lincoln,” which absolutely is no period piece. It might not even be too late to learn the address.
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.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.