The Gettysburg Address Examined

Jesse W. Weik (1857 – 1930) was a close friend and practicing law partner of the assassinated president; he was certainly the the first of Lincoln scholars to begin amassing the quantities of Lincoln minutia that biographers have relied upon for generations. In this essay, it is explained what Weik learned about The Gettysburg Address:

“In preparation for “Herndon and Weik’s Life of Lincoln” (1889), he visited every place in Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky where Abraham Lincoln lived; examined the records of all the lawsuits in which Lincoln was engaged, and talked to everyone he could find who knew Lincoln. For thirty years and more he has made a special study of the sources, written and unwritten, of the personal history of President Lincoln”.