Talk:Gettysburg Address


As a newbie image uploader, I've been struggling a bit. I hope I can get up the full set of Rev. Parker sermon pages that Herndon gave to Lincoln, from 4 July 1858.

Wikipedia main pages are not the place for the following, but I think it appropriate here to note that the very close phrasing in Rev. Parker's second formulation - "the institutions of America - Direct government, - over all the people, by all the people, for all the people" - to Lincoln's Gettysburg phrasing "government of the people, by the people, for the people", indicates that Rev. Parker's second phrasing was in fact the direct inspiration for Lincoln's words. Lincoln merely cut "all" and changed "over" to "of," but otherwise left the order intact.

Herndon in his report snagged on Rev. Parker's first phrasing - which has a different order, "over all the people, for all the people, by all the people" - and thus Herndon missed Rev. Parker's second, later phrasing of the same point; and this difference has opened the scholarly field for other options than Rev. Parker's sermon, as being Lincoln's direct inspiration.

I note that Rev. Parker died on May 10, 1860, in Italy (where he had gone for his health) and thus was not alive in late 1863 to claim credit for being the inspiration for Lincoln's phrasing. Since 1845, he had been pastor of the 28th Congregational Society of Boston, meeting at the Boston Music Hall, which was the site of the July 4, 1858 sermon.

The pandemic, combined with my advanced age, has kept me away from Cemetery Hill for 16 months, but recently, I detected that the NPS had replaced a critical Address-related marker. Today, I visited, surveyed, and photographed all of the Address-related signage in and near the National Cemetery.

The NPS's first attempt to point attention into Evergreen Cemetery was highly flawed, and I (virtually) mocked the flaw within the Wikipedia article. "To your left" was the flaw, but the new marker in the same location corrects the flaw and contains a vital bit of information - the platform location was never marked from the start.