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By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
Although it has long since entered the pantheon of American rhetoric as one of our nation’s great orations, there was a time, however brief, when the Gettysburg Address had its critics.
The president’s funeral sermon, an unnamed editorialist for The Chicago Times wrote, “was a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful.” The Gettysburg Address is famously succinct, less a speech — that honor went to the accomplished orator Edward Everett, whose two-hour disquisition was the main event — than a short set of remarks meant simply to commemorate the occasion.
