It was the biggest assignment of Joseph Ignatius Gilbert's journalistic career — and he was in serious danger of blowing it.
On Nov. 19, 1863, the 21-year-old Associated Press freelancer was standing before a "rude platform" overlooking the still-ravaged battlefield at Gettysburg, Pa. Towering above him was an almost mythic figure: Abraham Lincoln.
By this time, Gilbert had been covering the president for 2 ½ long years of civil war. Three months earlier, he had written a dispatch about the Union rout of Gen. George Pickett from this very field.
Lincoln had come to dedicate a portion of the battlefield — still strewn with equipment, clothing and horse skeletons — as a national cemetery. Gilbert was dutifully taking down the president's words in shorthand when something uncharacteristic happened.
He became star-struck.
"Fascinated by Lincoln's intense earnestness and depth of feeling, I unconsciously stopped taking notes," he would recall decades later, "and looked up at him just as he glanced from his manuscript with a faraway look in his eyes as if appealing from the few thousands before him to the invisible audience of countless millions whom his words were to reach."
Luckily for Gilbert, Lincoln graciously allowed his text to be copied while the ceremonies concluded. And "the press report was made from the copy," the AP man noted.
Power and poetry
Brief as Lincoln's speech was, many newspaper reports paraphrased or outright butchered it. In his new book, "Writing the Gettysburg Address," Martin P. Johnson argues that the fledgling wire service played a key role in ensuring that most Americans experienced the true power and poetry of their president's words at a time when he desperately wanted to reach them.
"The Gettysburg Address was not necessarily going to be an important text, if the first version published had been such a truncated version," Johnson writes.
But 150 years later, the debate continues over exactly what Lincoln said that day — and why it matters.
"Four score and seven years ago …" The speech contains about 250 words. Today, a listener with a smartphone could polish it off in 10 tweets or simply post the raw video on YouTube. But a century and a half ago, the news medium was a reporter taking notes with a pencil, most likely in shorthand.
Once finished, he would race to a telegraph office and hand over his dispatch to an operator, who would tap it out in Morse code. The story would travel to a newspaper office, where the series of dots and dashes were deciphered, then set in lead type.
There are five known drafts of the speech in Lincoln's own handwriting, each different from the other in some subtle or not-so-subtle way. The last, penned in March 1864, is the version chiseled in marble on the Lincoln Memorial.
