One question I have about the Gettysburg address:
In the film Lincoln two recruits who talk to Lincoln have memorized the speech. Was this historically accurate? Was the speech as respected then as it became later?
I'm going to try and find the reports on it but they were BRUTAL at the time by anti-Lincoln newspapers.
Here's some:
London Times wrote that 'the ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln...Anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce.'
Chicago Times: ‘The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances.’
the Harrisburgh Patriot and Union wrote their reason for choosing not to print his Gettysburgh address as, “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” A few years ago they wrote a retraction of their response to it haha.
Like everything Lincoln did the response was divided based on if you liked what he was doing or not. That's all that mattered to them.
His second inaugural address (With malice toward none, with charity for all …) was “one of the most awkwardly expressed documents I ever read … When he knew it would be read by millions all over the world, why under the heavens did he not make it a little more creditable to American
scholarship?" by a Pennsylvania paper.
NY Herald called it “a little speech of ‘glittering generalities’ used only to fill in the program.”
Chicago Times (his home state paper) called it “We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln could produce a paper so slip-shod, so loose-jointed, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp.”
That speech is on the base of the Lincoln Monument and considered one of the greatest speeches in US history.