Two Minutes That Changed History

Two Minutes That Changed History

He slumped over his desk in weariness. His face looked like the cracked leather of his old chair. Some fifty-one thousand boys had been slaughtered on a Pennsylvania battlefield, and he was expected to say a few words in memorial to the fallen. So he labored deep into the night for something better than pious platitudes from a worn-out politician.

But inspiration didn’t come easily. His screaming wife was suffering one of those migraine headaches that had turned their loveless marriage into a nightmare. He laid his pen aside and escaped next door with his half-written speech. His neighbor agreed that it was a poor start. Overwhelmed with melancholy, he fell into his lonely bed for another sleepless night.

Early the next morning, he caught his train for a grueling journey to the battlefield. He again tried to finish his speech, but it hardly mattered anyway. The main eulogy was to be delivered by Edward Everett, the golden-tongued orator from Massachusetts. The lonely man on the train was invited as an afterthought to give a few closing remarks. The invitation bluntly stated that he should speak a couple of minutes at most. No one ever wanted to follow an Edward Everett speech. And he felt that the words he had scratched out were unworthy of this hallowed occasion.

At ten o’clock in the morning on November 19, the tired man rode across the battlefield being dedicated to the fifty-one thousand slaughtered boys. Most of their corpses still lay in hastily dug graves. More than ten thousand spectators had jam-packed the fields around the grandstand, waiting for Everett’s speech. America’s greatest orator didn’t disappoint. His address lasted more than two hours, making it the longest speech in US history. When he finished, the applause was thunderous.

Then the next speaker, who was an afterthought, got up to deliver his closing remarks. They lasted two minutes, containing only 272 words. When he finished, he was greeted with deathly silence. His heart sank. Slumping next to his friend Ward Lamon, he whispered, “My talk went sour.” To the day he died, the man would rank this as his worst speech. To his surprise, applause began to ripple across the fields, growing into a deafening ovation. Harper’s Weekly later reported, “It was the perfect piece of American eloquence.” Newspapers hailed it as the greatest speech in history. Edward Everett said that in just two minutes Abraham Lincoln had captured the heart of Gettysburg better than his two-and-a-half-hour speech.

There was a time when every schoolchild memorized these remarks by a speaker who was invited as an afterthought only because he was the president. That Gettysburg Address gives a simple message: we cannot allow the dead to have died in vain. It is always up to the living to continue the work of those who died to give us a heritage. You might want to find a copy of those two minutes delivered by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Reading it may inspire you to remember this:

It is for the living to complete the unfinished work of the dead.

All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised. For God had something better in mind for us, so that they would not reach perfection without us.

Hebrews 11:39-40