Whether or not he wrote it (I think it’s written by him), it is a little ode on the nature of language: the famous language of the speech, the commanding language of the law, and the language which makes action possible.
The President’s manuscript is below, followed by my transcription of it. In an age of pretty fonts and easy publishing, the image of hand-writing gets about as close to speech as a text can get. It demanded hand-writing, which, in a digital age, underlines the sincerity of a message. The speech’s solemn nature, its multiplicity of forms, seemed to demand something more than an electronic press release from him. But, this evening, he did release a little, hand-written essay about the address. President Obama didn’t go to Gettysburg today, which some critics, well, criticized him for. We interact with its little body of words countless ways before we read it, aloud, as Lincoln did. We carve the speech out of marble we emboss it onto metal we print it in postcards, textbooks, parchment.
The speech is knotted into countless forms of media. While many historians dispute the legend that the president finished the speech on the back of an envelope, the idea of spontaneity remains. However many he said, they were few enough that they could be hand-written. No one’s quite sure how many words, exactly, Lincoln said at that cemetery in Pennsylvania. It’s a famously short speech and a famously ambiguous one. Today, November 19, is the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
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