Rhetorical Devices In The Gettysburg Address

“What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world” (Lee qtd. by Glum). The U.S. Civil War was not a proud moment in our history. This quote by General Robert E. Lee presents how war discloses the ugly sides of all parties involved. One of the ugliest events in the Civil War that even turned brothers against each other was the Battle of Gettysburg; being the “bloodiest battle of the Civil War”, Gettysburg “left nearly 52,000 men killed, wounded or missing in action”. (Civil War Trust fact 7) If anyone or anything was going to help to stop this devastation, it was going to be the president at the time, Abraham Lincoln. What better way to do it than to write one of the most influential speeches of all time, “The Gettysburg Address”. Lincoln creates three main goals in his speech: to unite, to teach, and to give goals. He achieves these goals by using patriotic language, diction, and syntax. One of Lincoln’s main points in his speech is to unite both opposing sides of the nation to make a better country that was originally intended to be one of freedom and equality for everyone but didn’t work out

He makes very specific word choices and phrases like using “conceived in liberty”, “dedicated”, and “proposition” (Lincoln Abraham Lincoln Online). He uses these words as very powerful and much more deeply meant than what someone would first think. He also uses “consecrate” and “final resting place” to illustrate how this site of the battle wasn’t going to be remembered as where he made his speech, “nor remember what we say here”, but as where so many men lost there lives for something that they believed in (Lincoln Abraham Lincoln