Never Say Sell

CHAPTER 17Discipline 6: Tell Great Stories

Midway through the third year of the American Civil War, John Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary, presented the President with a stack of invitations. As Lincoln read through them, he paused on one from David Wills, an attorney in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Wills had raised money to dig up the 50,000 who had fallen in the Battle of Gettysburg and to rebury them in a new national cemetery. Wills had already booked former senator, governor, secretary of state, and president of Harvard, Edward Everett, as the lead speaker for dedication of the cemetery but, in a long shot, wondered if the President might stop by and say a few words.

Three weeks later, suffering from a bout of smallpox, Lincoln traveled by train to Gettysburg, mulling over the words he had prepared. Feverish and cold, his soul, too, must have ached as he contemplated a nation raw from loss and suffering. At the same time, he saw victory on the horizon and yearned to give meaning to the conflict he alone had decided to prosecute.

Witnesses say the President looked ghastly and drawn on the day of the memorial. When finally he rose to speak after Everett's two-hour oration, his head swimming from the fever, he leaned into his words,

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Starting out with a bang, Lincoln summoned the ghosts ...