Lincoln's Gettysburg Address totally overshadowed this guy's two-hour speech at the same event
Arguably, Everett's words that day deserve just as much attention and praise as Lincoln's. His speech backhanded the Confederacy and directly addressed the horrific and hypocritical nature of slavery in a free country.
The day's organizers had named Everett the main attraction - no one even knew for sure if Lincoln would attend the dedication. Everett, also a former senator and president of Harvard, had every reason to believe he'd steal the show. He wrote a two-hour speech, full of beautiful language and logic, that explained the significance and the tragedy of the Battle of Gettysburg, the standoff during the Civil War with the most causalities, often thought of as a turning point. And he delivered all of it from memory, according to the History Channel.
"It is in reality a war originally levied by ambitious men in the cotton-growing States, for the purpose of drawing the slaveholding Border States into the vortex of the conspiracy, " Everett said about the start of the Civil War.
Indeed, Everett related this battle for freedom to the one the Greeks fought millenia ago:
The speech goes on to describe the three-day battle fought at Gettysburg and the immeasurable losses suffered by both victor and vanquished. Everett makes clear, however, that the blame laid with the Confederacy:
The two-hour-long speech concludes with another glorification of the Union victory: "... wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, and down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country there will be no brighter page than that which relates the battles of Gettysburg."
Everett's epic speech was followed by a 273 words speech from Lincoln, lasting less than two minutes. While the president never mentioned slavery and did not directly criticize the South, his words had a far more lasting impression.
Here's Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:
Even Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln the next day, asserting, "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."
A version of this post was originally written by Christina Sterbenz.