Cornell University's Copy
Cornell’s manuscript of the Gettysburg Address was written out by President Lincoln at the request of George Bancroft, the most famous historian of his day. On February 23, 1864 Bancroft attended a White House reception and asked Lincoln for a copy of the Gettysburg Address in his own handwriting. He explained that he was making the request for his stepson, Colonel Alexander Bliss. The Colonel was a member of a committee collecting manuscripts which were to be included in a lithographed volume of facsimiles entitled Autographed Leaves of Our Country's Authors, to be sold by the Baltimore Sanitary Fair. The Fair was to provide some assistance to soldiers, especially those ill in hospitals.
Lincoln agreed, and a week later he mailed a copy to the historian—the same day that he mailed another copy to Edward Everett, who had spoken with Lincoln at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery in November.
To his dismay, Bancroft found that Lincoln had written on both sides of the paper. The lithograph process which was to be used to make the facsimile required that the reverse side of the paper bearing writing or printing be blank. It would be impossible to reproduce this copy employing the lithographic process then in use.
Bancroft wrote to the President explaining the situation and asking for another copy. Wishing to make sure that the new copy would be suitable, Lincoln asked Nicolay to write back asking for several sheets of stationery so that the speech could be written on pages of the right size. The sheets were sent to the White House.
Shortly after March 7, Lincoln penned a new copy and mailed it to Bancroft. This version was reproduced in the volume of facsimiles. The descendants of Colonel Bliss, who inherited this copy, sold it at auction in 1949 for $54,000. The buyer, Oscar B. Cintas of Havana, who had been Cuban Ambassador to the United States, later willed the manuscript to the American people. It now resides in the Lincoln Room in the White House.
The Bancroft copy stayed in the Bancroft family. Bancroft’s grandson, Dr. Wilder Bancroft, Professor of Chemistry at Cornell, inherited it, and it remained in his possession for many years. He kept the copy in his home on campus. In 1929 he sold it to a New York dealer for $100,000. The dealer held it for several years and then was forced to sell it during the Depression, for half the sum he had paid for it, to a buyer in Indianapolis who in turn sold it to another resident of that city, Mrs. Nicholas H. Noyes. In 1949 Mrs. Noyes presented the manuscript to Cornell, as part of the Nicholas H. Noyes collection of Historical Americana.
Cornell’s copy of the Gettysburg Address is part of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library.
Transcript of Cornell University's Copy
President Lincoln delivered the 272 word Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863 on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
"Fourscore 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. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Compare Cornell’s copy to transcripts of the two early drafts at the Library of Congress.