My project examines the legacy of the Gettysburg Address from 1863 to 1965. After an introduction and a chapter setting the stage, each succeeding chapter surveys the meaning of the Gettysburg Address at key moments: the initial reception of the speech in 1863; its status during the semi-centennial in 1913 and during the construction of the Lincoln Memorial; the place it held during the world wars; and the transformation of the Address in the late 1950s and early 1960s marked by the confluence of the Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, Lincoln Birth Sesquicentennial, and Civil War Centennial. My final chapter considers how interpretations of the Address changed in textbooks from 1900 to 1965, and provides the entire trajectory of the evolving meanings of the speech in one medium and in one chapter. For each time period I have analyzed what the Address meant to people living in four cities: Gettysburg, Richmond, New York, and London. My argument is twofold. First, rather than operating as a national document the Gettysburg Address has always held different meanings in the North and South. Given that the speech addressed questions central to the United States (equality and democracy), this lack of a common interpretation illustrates that there was no singular collective memory or national identity regarding core values. Second, as the nation and world shifted, so did the meaning of the Gettysburg Address. Well into the twentieth-century the essence of the speech was proclaimed to be its support of the democratic form of government as opposed to monarchies or other institutions. But in the middle twentieth-century that interpretation began to shift, with many both abroad and at home beginning to see the speech’s assertion of human equality as its focal point and most important contribution.

By examining Virginia newspapers from the fall of 1863 this paper will bring to light what Civil War-era Southerners thought of the Gettysburg Address. This work is confined to Virginia not because that state is representative of the Confederacy, but because Southern reporting on the Address was wholly shaped by the Richmond papers. The first two chapters of this thesis reveal that Southern editors censored reporting on the Gettysburg Address because of Lincoln's affirmation that "all men are created equal. The final chapter traces Virginians' responses to the Address up to 1963. Drawing on newspaper editorials, textbooks adopted by Virginia's schools, coverage of the major anniversaries of the Address in the state's newspapers, and accounts of Memorial Day celebrations, this chapter makes clear that Virginians largely ignored the Gettysburg Address in the twentieth-century while Northerners considered it an essential national document. In 1963, as in 1863, it was the assertions about equality that Southerners could not abide. This divergence of response, even in 1963, lays bare the myth of a completed sectional reconciliation and shared national identity. / Master of Arts

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