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The Rhetoric of Lincoln's Speech
No politician is given as good a speech since. No politician has delivered a speech that is 272 words since. It does what any great speech does, which is it speaks to something bigger than the moment. They were there to consecrate a battlefield as a cemetery but instead he talked about very founding ideals. He passes from the eulogy to the war dead quite quickly and transports it into a pion of praise to the democracy, to the city, to the republic. That transition marks all of rhetoric, and it's the start of rhetoric and democracy which are twinned.