Many professional actors, not to mention countless schoolchildren, have taken a stab at the Gettysburg Address. I don’t know what the original was like; I wasn’t there. Today all we have is descriptions left behind by witnesses, such Sarah A. Cooke Myers, who in 1931 was quoted as saying, “I was close to the President and heard all of the Address, but it seemed short. Then there was an impressive silence …. There was no applause when he stopped speaking.”
For his 2012 portrayal of Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln,” British-born actor Daniel Day-Lewis practiced speaking in a high-pitched voice, because that’s what Lincoln sounded like. Many Gettysburg Address portrayals are done in too baritone a voice (or at least you’ll think so, if you liked Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Lincoln’s speaking style); others are too formal or informal. Of the many versions on YouTube, I think I like John Mansfield’s about the best; the gestures and speech feel authentic for a speech delivered outdoors to a small crowd, and the tone and inflections sound right to me.
The mistake many orators make is trying to deliver a speech for the ages. Neither Lincoln nor his audience knew it was that, any more than they knew Gettysburg would be the greatest battle of the war. (It was not, however, the turning point; that came earlier the same week, at Vicksburg.) These were words, albeit carefully chosen through multiple written drafts, for the dedication of a soldiers’ cemetery while the war was still being fought; and to him, and them, the end of the bloodshed was not yet in sight. They were meant to rally a weary nation’s morale by paying respects to the dead and giving the still-living a reason to soldier on.
Lincoln accomplished that by defining America’s nationhood in a few simple words everyone could understand, and that’s why it’s a great speech. It’s so difficult to replicate because, as with all great speeches, his connection with the audience not only with words but also through body language and tone is what made it work.