It’s one of the shortest, yet most famous speeches in history (not just American history), clocking in at just 271 words, but packed with the deepest meaning about the terrible experience the nation was going through in its Civil War, fought ostensibly on the issues of secession and States Rights within the Union, but really over the underlying reason of abolition of slavery. What follows is the original by Abraham Lincoln:
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. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us— that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
A new version of the speech appeared a few months ago, courtesy of the online AI tool, ChatGPT, when asked by a philosopher, Spencer Case, to re-write Lincoln’s famous speech in the manner of “postmodern/radical feminist icon” named Judith Butler (details at the link). This was the result:
In a performative act of memorialization, we gather here to invoke the memory of a conflict that, through the violent demarcations of power and sovereignty, has sought to reconstitute the fragile architecture of a nation founded on the equivocal premise of freedom and equality. The battlefield upon which we stand—this material site—serves as both a testament to the entangled lives that have been lost and as a symbolic space where the performative nature of nationhood is both affirmed and contested.
The lives that were sacrificed here exceed the normative frameworks of historical narration; they resist full recuperation into the discourse of nation-building because they reveal the precarity that undergirds any national project premised on exclusions and hierarchies. These bodies, rendered vulnerable by the mechanisms of state power, demonstrate that the so-called “union” is not a fixed entity, but one continually (re)produced through the discursive operations of war, sacrifice, and memory.
We cannot, within the confines of this performative occasion, fully “dedicate” or “consecrate” this ground, for to do so would be to presume a mastery over the lives and losses that have taken place here—a mastery that remains necessarily incomplete. The very notion of consecration implies an authority that we, as subjects situated within the ideological apparatuses of power, can never fully possess. Instead, it is the act of remembrance itself, enacted collectively and iteratively, that calls into question the viability of the structures of governance and identity that led to this war.
And yet, we remain beholden to the ongoing project of democracy—not as a static ideal, but as a performative act that must constantly be re-negotiated in light of the ever-present threat of violence and erasure. The task ahead is not merely to affirm the survival of a nation, but to interrogate the conditions of possibility under which such a nation might persist without replicating the very exclusions and inequalities that precipitated its own crisis. Thus, the struggle for democracy is, at its core, a struggle against the normalization of violence and the naturalization of oppression.
In this moment of collective address, let us not merely honor the dead, but let us commit ourselves to the perpetual critique of the very structures that render lives precarious and disposable, with the understanding that such a critique is the only path toward a more just and livable future.
I laughed at two comments on the Powerline blog from which this is sourced that, “This is actually much more lucid than the bulk of Butler’s so-called writing” and that “AI technology is going to have to be much more advanced to produce prose as ghastly as Judith Butler’s”
No Minister 
The previous speaker before Lincoln rambled on for several hours!!!
Any fool can make the simple complex, what takes real genius is to make the complex simple.
To be fair to the previous speaker he later wrote a letter to Lincoln, saying that the President had come closer to the core of the matter in two minutes “than I had in two hours”.
I’ve been reading Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War”. It will take, I fear, as long as the war lasted, to read.
So far, one volume in, the under resourced South are thrashing the invading Feds from the North.
It seems like the South are a shoe in to win, non withstanding the MSM boosted speeches by Lincoln.
Over a decade ago I hesitated about buying the three volumes as a boxed set because of the cost – $NZ180 from Borders if I recall correctly – but found it well worth while.
Foote was a novelist and so his history reads easier, even with the incredible detail he brings, than most history books.