The Gettysburg Address

Edition

The final text, known as the Bliss copy, as printed in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler for the Abraham Lincoln Association (Rutgers University Press, 1953), volume 7, pages 22 and 23, in the digital edition of the University of Michigan Library (read from its capture of 3 November 2024 by the Internet Archive, the site being behind a browser check on 27 September 2026). Checked word for word against the scans of the three pages of the manuscript on Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blisscopy-1.jpg, Blisscopy-2.jpg, Blisscopy-3.jpg, marked public domain). The digital edition types each of the seven dashes as three hyphens (---), the TeX convention for an em dash: they are set as em dashes, and the manuscript has a dash at each of these places. The edition’s note calls (33, 34) are left out. The date and the signature, “November 19. 1863. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.”, are set on one line, the signature in small capitals; the manuscript has “Abraham Lincoln.” above the date.

Rights

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) wrote this copy out in 1864, and it was published in facsimile the same year in Autograph Leaves of Our Country’s Authors. In France, its author died on 15 April 1865, before 1 January 1956; in the United States, it was published before 1931. A faithful transcription of it adds no protected work.

The manuscript “is kept on view in the Lincoln Bedroom on the second floor of the White House” (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gettysburg_Address_Bliss_copy.jpg). The Collected Works are online “with permission from their copyright holder” (University of Michigan Library): the poster takes from them only Lincoln’s words, not the editorial notes.