How Many Words are in the Gettysburg Address?

It is one of the most praised and well-known speeches ever given by an American president, and one of the shortest speeches on record. The Gettysburg Address still resounds with an almost supernatural profundity almost a century and a half later.

There are 256 words - give or take - in the speech Abraham Lincoln gave at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, PA. Lincoln delivered the speech Nov. 19, 1863, about four and a half months after the decisive Battle of Gettysburg, the bloody engagement that turned the tide of the Civil War to the side of the Union Army.

More than 7500 soldiers - more than three times the population of the village of Gettysburg - died in that battle. Gettysburg became hallowed ground in that crucial engagement.

Lincoln spoke just two minutes when he delivered the Gettysburg Address. The words resound to this day. As some of his audience said that day, Lincoln summarized the entire war up in just ten sentences.

In those few, short sentences, Lincoln honored the dead at Gettysburg, but more to the point, he gave the reasons for why the Civil War was being fought - that the soldiers would not have died in vain, having given the “last full measure of devotion” - that is, their lives for the preservation of the Union.

Versions of the Gettysburg Address

There are at least five versions of the Gettysburg Address, and some historians say, there are even more.

Why did Lincoln have five (or more) manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address? The speech was so popular that he gave two of the copies to John Nicolay and John Hay, his secretaries. Several other copies were written by Lincoln to be donated for charitable causes.

The version that has become the go-to version, known as the “Bliss copy,”  is a version Lincoln drafted himself with a title, and then signed and dated the paper.

Address Remembers the Reason is Freedom

Lincoln started the Gettysburg Address with a nod to the Founding Fathers: “Four score and seven years ago...” That is, 87 years before the Civil War, Lincoln continued that the Founders had “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Those words spoke to one of the two main reasons behind the War Between the States - whether the South would continue to have and keep slaves, and whether in so doing, their decision to secede from the Union could be allowed.

Lincoln clearly had his own idea of who should be winning the war. At Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke to the ground that had been drenched with the blood of patriots, northern and southern alike. A portion of the battlefield, Lincoln said in the address, would be dedicated as a “final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

Last Full Measure of Devotion

At that point in the speech, Lincoln says that neither he, nor the people present, are capable of doing justice to dedicating the land as a cemetery and memorial.

The men who died at Gettysburg, Lincoln said, had already consecrated the ground: “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated (the ground), far above our power to add or detract.”

He added, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

It was for the living to honor the cause for which the dead had given “the last full measure of devotion.”

The last words of the address are breathtaking even today: “....we 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.”

No matter how many words are in the Gettysburg Address, they still ring strongly in the hearts of people who are dedicated to the cause of freedom.