Puzzling Evidence
This Month's Puzzle

• Puzzling Evidence:  True Stories

• This Month's Puzzle:  The Mystery of the Gettysburg Address

• Links to Puzzling Evidence On-Line:  A Potpourri of Puzzle Sites {cont.}

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This Month's Puzzle:
The Mystery of the Gettysburg Address

Let us start out by telling you that we don't expect you to solve this one.  But if you do, you will definitely make the history books.  ...

As you may have already gathered, one of the themes of this month's issue is Memorial Day.  ...  A federal holiday, Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day -- a day on which people were expected to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers.  Decoration Day was instituted right after the Civil War, by General Order No. 11, given by John A. Logan, then Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, on May 5, 1868. 

Yet as much as we may remember Memorial Day, few have ever read the General Order which gave birth to it.  On the other hand, nearly everyone, and not in our own country only, is familiar with President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  ... 

Delivered on November 19, 1863 -- some four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg -- Lincoln followed a two-hour speech by Edward Everett with his own 'two minute' speech.  It was ignored my much of the press at the time, which focused more on Everett's oration.  But Everett himself approached Lincoln after the fact and stated plainly:  "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."

But the address that we know may not, in fact, be the one which Lincoln delivered.  ...

The fact is, there have been at least five known drafts of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  But three of them can be ruled out fairly convincingly, since Lincoln wrote them relatively long after the occasion, usually in fulfillment of a request from an admirer of the speech.  Thus, one of these later copies went to Everett himself.  Another -- the "Bancroft copy" -- went to a professor of history by that name at Cornell, and the third of them went to Col. Alexander Bliss, Bancroft's step-son.  Curiously, the one which has been most cited, read, and proliferated is the Bliss copy, which is almost certainly the latest.

Of the two remaining copies, one is referred to as the Nicolay draft and is generally presumed to be the earliest.  The working assumption is that Lincoln took the first page of the Nicolay draft with him -- which had been written on Executive Stationery -- along with some blank lined paper and a pencil, which he used on the way to Gettysburg to finish the speech.

On the other hand, the Nicolay draft is at odds in some respects with accounts given by other listeners who were present for the Address.  For example, the phrase "under God" { as in, "that this nation [under God] shall have a new birth of freedom ..."} is missing from the Nicolay version.  The Hay draft, however, was very probably not written until after Lincoln returned from Gettysburg to D.C..  ...

And so begins a puzzle that has yet to be solved to anyone's {much less everyone's} satisfaction.  ...  In addition to the conflicting evidence already noted:

• Both the first and second pages of the Nicolay draft fit together along their folds.

• Eyewitnesses recounted seeing Lincoln reach into his pocket and take from it a folded sheet {or more} of paper.

• If Lincoln did read the Nicolay draft, and if the accounts of others who heard the speech differing from the Nicloay draft are accurate, then Lincoln would have departed from the written text.  However, most who knew him and most who have studied his life since, suggest that this would have been very uncharacteristic of Lincoln, who {almost always} stayed with what he had on paper.

If you're at all curious about this mystery, then we invite you to take a look at the pages through the links we've provided in the table of photos, above.

Meanwhile, what strikes us as even more curious is why, if consensus has it that the actual Gettysburg Address, as delivered, has to lie in the Hay or Nicloay draft, or somewhere in between, then why is the Bliss draft the one has made it into more general circulation?

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If you have a puzzle you'd like to submit to our Monthly Puzzle feature, let us know by e-mail at

puzzles@downstreetmagazine.com

We'll look it over and, if we use it, you can receive a small honorarium for your trouble.  {See our Freelancers Wanted page for more info.

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