On Friday, Tyrone ninth graders filled their English classes with the majestic sentences of The Gettysburg Address as they commemorated the 141st anniversary of President Lincoln’s speech at Pennsylvania’s most hallowed battlefield.
According to ninth grade English teacher Richard Merryman, “Exactly 141 years after Abraham Lincoln delivered The Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863, Tyrone ninth graders performed and analyzed the history, brevity and variety of Lincoln’s speech as they work to enhance their own public speaking skills.”
Before performing Lincoln’s speech, ninth graders recalled the gruesome history that led to The Gettysburg Address. On the first, second and third of July 1863, the blood of Americans stained the fields around Gettysburg in a three-day battle which claimed the lives of 51,000 Americans. During the Battle of Gettysburg, cattle died and 8,000 military horses lost their lives.
According to the Hartford Courant, a few scientists even speculate that the vultures that now winter around Gettysburg return there every year because their bird ancestors fed on tens of thousands of carcasses strewn across Gettysburg in the Battle of 1863.
Also, Tyrone ninth graders discovered that Civil War Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin desired that Lincoln make his dedication speech at Gettysburg a model of brevity. The president spoke briefly since Harvard President Edward Everett Hale, not Lincoln, was the principal speaker for this Gettysburg dedication.
In fact, Edward Hale spoke from noon until 2 p.m. to an audience of possibly 30,000 people, who sometimes listened and other times wandered around the carcass-strewn fields. With an actor’s eloquence and without the aid of microphone, Edward Hale spoke boldly for two hours. Then President Lincoln rose, drew the manuscript from his pocket and in clear, high and slow voice uttered the brief 272 words people now know as The Gettysburg Address.
Five times during the speech the audience applauded. Still, Lincoln’s speech proved so brief that a newspaper photographer lacked the time needed to set up his camera. Yet after the president finished, the first speaker for the day, Edward Hale said this to Lincoln, “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, Mr. President.”
Finally, Tyrone freshmen appreciated the verbal variety that this Civil War president brought to the speech. For instance, sometimes he used old-fashioned phrases like “four-score and seven years ago” for 87. Other times, Lincoln repeated words like “conceived” and “dedicated.” He also paired up rhyming words like “consecrate” and “dedicate.” For the sake of variety, this log-splitter turned speaker contrasted long words like proposition with short words like war. He even foreshadowed the Pledge to the Flag when he used the phrase “under God.”
Finished Merryman, “Someday one of our ninth grade guys or girls might become president of the United States. One good way for an English teacher to prepare students for that awesome responsibility is to enhance their speaking skills. And what better way to improve speaking skills than to perform and analyze the history, brevity and variety of that speech which so nobly honors those Americans who gave their last full measure of devotion so that ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”’
