offered the nation a means of atonement. By 1865, with the cost of saving the Union to be measured in terms of 600,000 Civil War dead, Lincoln had removed all evidence of his own intermediary presence, admitting that neither he nor anyone else could claim exclusive knowledge of divine intentions (Dwight G. Anderson 159).
Yet, Lincoln carried through his idea of a spiritual intervention in the affairs of men again and again in his speeches and writings, and he saw in the war between North and South an image of sacrificial death and rebirth that would become the central metaphor in the Gettysburg Address,
which, in three short paragraphs, has provided a sacramental rite for Lincoln's political religion. It is a sacrament which has been memorized by grammar school students for generations, and thus has become so familiar to most Americans that the words have lost their meaning (Dwight G. Anderson 187-188).
The speech was delivered on November 19, 1863. The occasion for the speech was the dedication of a cemetery in Gettysbu
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