Lincoln began his 271-word address in Gettysburg with the now famed phrase, "Four score and seven years ago", which was a reference to the nation's founding in the American Revolution, during which the Founding Fathers ultimately concluded that they could not reconcile their differences with King George III and instead needed to enjoin and prevail in the Revolutionary War in pursuit of full independence from British colonial rule, leading the Second Continental Congress, convened in the revolutionary capital of Philadelphia, to establish the Continental Army and elect George Washington to command it against British in 1775, and to unanimously adopt and issue the Declaration of Independence the following year, in 1776, which led the Thirteen Colonies into war in pursuit of independence from colonial rule.

The tradition began in 1831 when Justice Joseph Story delivered the dedication address at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[22] The Bliss version is as follows: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

[25] In contrast, writer Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, notes that while Everett's Oration was explicitly neoclassical, referring directly to Marathon and Pericles, "Lincoln's rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical.

[29][30] LaFantasie also connected "four score and seven years" with Psalms 90:10, and referred to Lincoln's usage of the phrase "our fathers" as "mindful of the Lord's Prayer".

"[36] It is theorized, that Hungarian statesman Lajos Kossuth's February 19, 1852 speech given at the Ohio State Legislature, might have also had an influence on Lincoln: "The spirit of our age is Democracy.

[39] Both the Hay and Nicolay copies of the Address are within the Library of Congress, encased in specially designed, temperature-controlled, sealed containers with argon gas in order to protect the documents from oxidation and continued deterioration.

[45][46] Others believe that the delivery text has been lost, because some of the words and phrases of the Nicolay copy do not match contemporary transcriptions of Lincoln's original speech.

[52] Everett was collecting the speeches at the Gettysburg dedication into one bound volume to sell for the benefit of stricken soldiers at New York's Sanitary Commission Fair.

[55] This copy remained in the Bancroft family for many years, was sold to various dealers and purchased by Nicholas and Marguerite Lilly Noyes,[56] who donated the manuscript to Cornell University in 1949.

[59] Garry Wills concluded the Bliss copy "is stylistically preferable to others in one significant way: Lincoln removed 'here' from 'that cause for which they (here) gave ...' The seventh 'here' is in all other versions of the speech."

[60] From November 21, 2008, to January 1, 2009, the Albert H. Small Documents Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History hosted a limited public viewing of the Bliss copy, with the support of then-First Lady Laura Bush.

"[67] In an oft-repeated legend, Lincoln is said to have turned to his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon and remarked that his speech, like a bad plow, "won't scour".

[page needed] In a letter to Lincoln written the following day, Everett praised the President for his eloquent and concise speech, saying, "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.

[8] The Democratic-leaning Chicago Times observed, "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.

[64] In Massachusetts, the Springfield Republican also printed the entire speech, calling it "a perfect gem" that was "deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma".

[70] In 2013, on the sesquicentennial of the address, The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, retracted its original reaction ("silly remarks" deserving "the veil of oblivion", writing: "Seven score and ten years ago, the forefathers of this media institution brought forth to its audience a judgment so flawed, so tainted by hubris, so lacking in the perspective history would bring, that it cannot remain unaddressed in our archives. ...

He served in the United States Marine Corps during the war, and later had a successful career in insurance in Pennsylvania and New York City before entering Congress as a Democrat.

During the delivery, along with some other boys, young Rathvon wiggled his way forward through the crowd until he stood within 15 feet (4.6 m) of Lincoln and looked up into what he described as his "serious face".

A popular explanation for the Bachrach photo suggests that Lincoln's brief address, which followed a lengthy two hour speech by Everett, caught photographers by surprise.

This theory, however, has been questioned, since evidence exists suggesting that the photo was possibly taken before the Gettysburg Address and without any intention of photographing Lincoln from such a lengthy distance.

Lincoln was not one of them, and a small metal sign near the speech memorial stirs controversy by stating: The Address was delivered about 300 yards from this spot along the upper Cemetery drive.

[95]Holding title as the Traditional Site, the validity of the Soldiers' National Monument has been challenged by platform occupants (in the distant past) and by (relatively recent) photographic analyses.

[107] Confusing to today's tourist, the Kentucky Memorial is contradicted by a newer marker which was erected nearby by the Gettysburg National Military Park and locates the speakers' platform inside Evergreen Cemetery.

[111][112][113] In 1982, Senior Park Historian Kathleen Georg Harrison first analyzed photographs and proposed a location in Evergreen Cemetery but has not published her analysis.

Speaking for Harrison without revealing details, two sources characterize her proposed location as "on or near [the] Brown family vault" in Evergreen Cemetery.

[114][115] William A. Frassanito, a former military intelligence analyst, documented a comprehensive photographic analysis in 1995, and it associates the location of the platform with the position of specific modern headstones in Evergreen Cemetery.

[The location of the speech] was actually on the crown of this hill, a short distance on the other side of the iron fence and inside the Evergreen Cemetery, where President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address to a crowd of some 15,000 people.

This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice."

[139] This widely held misunderstanding may have originated with The Perfect Tribute, a 1906 book by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, which was assigned reading for generations of schoolchildren, sold 600,000 copies when published as a standalone volume,[140] and was twice adapted into a movie.