The Gettysburg Address

It is about 272 words and ten sentences, and the first of them does something quietly radical. Lincoln dates the country not to the Constitution of 1787 but to four score and seven years earlier — to 1776, and to the Declaration's claim that all men are created equal. In a single clause he moves the nation's founding document from the one that tolerated slavery to the one that did not.

Everything after that follows from it. The war stops being a legal argument about secession and becomes a test of whether a nation conceived on that proposition can survive at all. The dead are not mourned so much as handed forward: the living are told the work is unfinished and left with it.

Five copies survive in Lincoln's own hand and they do not agree word for word — he kept revising after the fact, which is its own kind of tell. Newspapers split along party lines about whether it had been any good. It took a generation for the speech to become the thing Americans quote when they want to say what the country is for.