Writing in 1894, James Bryce MP (1838-1922), British Ambassador to the USA from 1907 to 1913, said that he had it ‘on good authority’ that on the train to Gettysburg Lincoln turned to his neighbour and said, “I suppose I shall be expected to say something this afternoon; lend me a pencil and a bit of paper.” Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), at that time Secretary to the President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, claimed to be the man who lent him the pencil. General Julius H. Stahl, who was in the carriage with Lincoln, saw him writing; General James B. Fry, also in the carriage that day, said there had been no time to write anything. John Russell Young of the Philadelphia Press told how the President, upon the battlefield, ‘took the single sheet of foolscap, held it almost to his nose, and, in his high tenor voice, without the least attempt for effect, delivered that most extraordinary address’; as far as he remembered that day, Senator Cornelius Cole (1822-1924) was sure that ‘Mr Lincoln probably made not a word or note in preparation for that address’. It seems we shall never really know what happened.

Lincoln’s two-minute speech followed a two-hour effort by Edward Everett (1794-1865). James Bryce drew attention to the contrast. “It is a short speech” he wrote of the President’s reflection. “It is wonderfully terse in expression. It is quiet, so quiet that at the moment it did not make upon the audience, an audience wrought up by a long and highly-decorated harangue from one of the prominent orators of the day, an impression at all commensurate to that which it began to make as soon as it was read over America and Europe. But it states certain truths and principles in phrases so aptly chosen and so forcible, that one feels as if those truths could have been conveyed in no other words, and as if this deliverance of them were made for all time.”