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At the consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 9, 1863, Hon. Edward Everett was the orator of the day, and President Lincoln made the dedicatory address. Concerning Mr. Lincoln’s appearance on that memorable occasion, Mr. Edward McPherson, Clerk of the National House of Representatives, in a newspaper report, said that Mr. Lincoln never showed more ungainliness of figure, “slouchiness” of dress, and angularity of gesture, all of which appeared in striking contrast with the elegance and grace of person, speech, and manner that characterized Mr. Everett. But although every one admired the rhetorical effects produced by Everett during his oration of ninety minutes’ length, they had not been “aroused to enthusiasm, nor melted to tenderness.” “But,” says Mr. McPherson, “as Mr. Lincoln proceeded no face ever more unmistakably mirrored a conviction than did Mr. Everett’s, that by these few but weighty sentences, all memory of what he had said was erased. It is part of the current mention of the times that Mr. Everett, in congratulating Mr. Lincoln at the close of the exercises, laughingly, but with a sense of its truth, remarked, ‘You have said all on this occasion that will be remembered by posterity.’”

Hon. James Speed, formerly Attorney-General, under Lincoln, says that Lincoln showed him a letter from Everett, eulogizing the Gettysburg speech in the very highest terms, and that a year or two after the death of Mr. Lincoln, there were present at his house in Washington, Senator Sumner, Governor Clifford, of Massachusetts, and others, and Mr. Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech became the subject of conversation. “Mr. Sumner said, and others concurred in what he said, that it was the most finished piece of oratory he had ever seen. Every word was appropriate—none could be omitted and none added and none changed.”

He also says,—

“I recollect that soon after its delivery, at my house in Louisville, Robert Dale Owen, who was present with others, took from his pocket a speech which he had cut from a newspaper, and read it aloud saying it would be translated into all languages in the world, being the very finest oration of the kind that had ever been delivered. He said there were utterances in it which would become familiar to all the people of the world as household words. I recollect further that Judge S. S. Nicholas, of Louisville, an accomplished man and a fine writer, upon first seeing the speech, spoke of it in terms of the highest praise, saying he did not believe a man of the education and culture of Mr. Lincoln could have written it. He believed, until corrected by me, that it had been written by another hand.”

One of the most remarkable tributes that has been paid was that of the London Quarterly Review, which said, substantially, that the oration surpassed every production of its class known in literature; that only the oration of Pericles over the victories of the Peloponnesian war could be compared to it, and that was put into his mouth by the historian Thucydides.

A greatly admired personal tribute to Lincoln is that of James Russell Lowell in the Harvard Commemoration Ode, July, 1865. It is especially noteworthy for its broad significance, its tender pathos, its discriminating appreciation, and its grand American sentiment, closing as follows:

Here was a type of the true elder race,

And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face.

I praise him not; it were too late;

And some innative weakness there must be

In him who condescends to victory

Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait

Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he:

He knew to bide his time,

And can his fame abide,

Still patient in his simple faith sublime

Till the wise years decide.

Great Captains, with their guns and drums,

Disturb our judgment for the hour,

But at last silence comes;

These are all gone, and, standing like a tower,

Our children shall behold his fame.

The kindly earnest, brave, foreseeing man,

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,

New birth of our new soil, the first American.

Governor Andrew, in an address to the Legislature of Massachusetts, following the assassination of Lincoln, after describing him as the man who had added “martyrdom itself to his other and scarcely less emphatic claims to human veneration, gratitude and love,” continued thus: “I desire on this grave occasion to record my sincere testimony to the unaffected simplicity of his manly purpose, to the constancy with which he devoted himself to his duty, to the grand fidelity with which he subordinated himself to his country, to the clearness, robustness, and sagacity of his understanding, to his sincere love of truth, his undeviating progress in its faithful pursuit, and to the confidence which he could not fail to inspire in the singular integrity of his virtues, and the conspicuously judicial quality of his intellect.”