Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Abraham Lincoln did not give the Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863 — at least, not the one engraved on the Lincoln Memorial, the one memorized by millions the world over. Lincoln actually wrote the words recognized today as the Gettysburg Address months after the cemetery dedication, during a full and complete revision of his speech that he finished in February 1864.

Lincoln’s revisions added about 14 percent more words to his original delivery text, the so-called Nicolay Draft, adding several key passages. But no addition was more important than the words “under God”: Lincoln had spoken those words, and others that were not in the delivery manuscript, in the inspiration of the moment, when he stood on the speaker’s platform and dedicated the nation to “a new birth of freedom.”

Influential observers, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to the editors of Harper’s Weekly, had immediately recognized the beauty and power of Lincoln’s speech as it was reported in the press. Soon it was being recited at funerals and quoted in political speeches, and the next year it began to appear in schoolbooks and handbooks of rhetoric. Even the featured speaker at the ceremony, Edward Everett, whose underappreciated speech was overshadowed by the president’s short address, later praised Lincoln’s words. Lincoln later told his old friend James Speed “that he had never received a compliment he prized more highly.”

Yet, the attention given his speech created a problem for Lincoln. In late January 1864, Everett asked Lincoln for “the manuscript of your dedicatory remarks,” so that it could be sold at a charity fair. Sending the delivery text would, however, publicize a text that differed markedly from the newspaper reports. According to Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay, who was directly involved, “Lincoln saw” that the newspaper accounts of his spoken words were “imperfect,” but also that, when compared with those reports and with his own recollection of what he had said, the delivery manuscript “seemed incomplete.”

Lincoln’s difficulty is our fortune, however, because rather than choose one text or the other, Lincoln created a new, revised version to send to Everett. The great care Lincoln took in creating the revised “Everett” version reveals that he recognized that this speech, these words, had undeniable power and meaning at that crucial moment in the Civil War.

Lincoln’s first step in creating this new version was to write out a copy, not of his delivery manuscript, but of one of the published accounts of the words he had reportedly spoken. This was a sign that, for Lincoln, the additions and changes that he made while speaking at the ceremony were vital elements of his evolving thought, building and enlarging upon the foundation provided by the delivery text. The published version of his words that Lincoln chose as the foundation text of his revision was close at hand: it was the version in the “authorized” report on the Gettysburg ceremony published by Edward Everett, which was in turn essentially a reprinting of the version originally published in The New York Tribune the day after the dedication. Everett had sent the “authorized” edition to Lincoln within a day or two of his request for “the manuscript” of Lincoln’s remarks, and Lincoln mentioned having it in his cover letter for the revised manuscript that he sent to Everett dated Feb. 4, 1864.

Lincoln’s handwritten copy included a few changes and is known as the “Hay Draft” in honor of Lincoln’s secretary John Hay. For over a century the “Hay” text puzzled and confused those seeking to understand how Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address, and over the years it has been held up as the first draft, the delivery text, or even a souvenir copy made for John Hay. But it seems certain now that Lincoln wrote and edited the “Hay” when he first set about reconciling the delivery manuscript and the reports of his spoken words.

In the second stage of revision, working from the basis of the edited “Hay” copy, Lincoln wrote a new, clean manuscript to send to Everett that included additional, mainly stylistic, changes. Expressing Lincoln’s choice of his spoken words as the foundation for his revisions, the final “Everett” revised manuscript incorporated his spoken “under God” in the passage of his delivery text that had originally read, “that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

Lincoln’s revised manuscript also retained other spoken innovations, like twice repeating, with slight variation, the phrase that in the delivery text read, “It is rather for us, the living.” This allowed Lincoln to retain in the revised “Everett” text a wholly new phrase he had added while speaking – “… be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on” – in addition to the single phrase of his manuscript delivery text, “…be dedicated to the great task remaining before us.” Five times, Lincoln’s delivery manuscript used variations of the word “dedicated,” and Lincoln made sure that his revised version incorporated his sixth, spoken use of the word, affirming and reaffirming his own commitment, and ours, to the “the great task” and to “the unfinished work” of preserving and extending the promise of a nation born in the struggle for freedom and equality.

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But Lincoln’s revised “Everett” manuscript also reverted to the wording of his original delivery manuscript at some points where it differed from the published accounts of what he had reportedly said. Most important, the revised version included the words “ … and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” that are found in the delivery text, even though the reports of his spoken words all included “and” for the people.

Similarly, reports of his spoken words agree that Lincoln twice repeated the words “we are met,” but in the revised manuscript Lincoln returned to the wording of the original “Nicolay” delivery text, which has instead “we are met” and “we have come.” Lincoln’s choices here and in other examples underscore the extent to which, throughout both the composition and the revision of his speech, he sought to combine both sound and sense, poetry and policy, in words he knew were widely considered both meaningful and beautiful.

The extent of the changes to the original delivery manuscript, even months after the event, reveals that Lincoln himself was striving toward a clearer understanding of his vision of the Civil War, and of the American experiment that he had expressed on that brilliant November day. Abraham Lincoln did give a speech at the Gettysburg cemetery on Nov. 19, 1863, but it was Lincoln’s revisions after returning to Washington, and our own national re-vision and renewal of the ideals he proclaimed, that continue to give us our Gettysburg Address.

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Sources: Gabor Boritt, “The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows”; Douglas L. Wilson, “Lincoln’s Sword: the Presidency and the Power of Words.”

Martin P. Johnson is assistant professor of history at Miami University and the author of “Writing the Gettysburg Address,” the co-winner of the 2014 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.