Well, what would you expect of someone born in 1809. The technology of audio recording missed the voice of Abraham Lincoln by more than a few years. And so we'll always be left with projected thoughts as to how he might have sounded. It is known that he had a fairly high pitched voice. His Kentucky/Indiana/Illinois accent, as Gore Vidal says somewhere, would have rang with its own idiosyncratic vowels. "Mr. Chairman," would have come out a bit like "Mr. Cheyrrman" (drawn out.)

Sam Waterston has done a noble job bringing to life the voice, the demeanor, of that voice so part of the grain of the American soul. YouTube shows him at the Library of Congress preparing for his role, the items of Lincoln's pockets from the night of his assassination before him. And there are a lot of corny recordings of grand voices stentorious rendering Lincoln, pronouncing words like 'endure' more like FDR would have in one of his national pep talks. Early movies, Walt Disney dioramas, they all seem to bring him the same injustice. Raymond Massey, even Gregory Peck, all suggesting a big man with a voice none other than big and deep, a bass, not a tenor-baritone, as if to 'strong man' it across the plate, when Lincoln's devices were much finer, much more subtle and intelligent than a dictatorial fast ball or tank brigade. And no trace of any bitterness at the duty, but rather the sense that he was the perfect man, maybe eerily so, for the job. What he said that day, he would have said gently. (Herndon, his law partner and semi-historian, is clear on the point; Lincoln was a tenor.)

We'll never know exactly, but somehow we are able to imagine his voice best on our own. Children, somehow, love to play him.

Was Sandburg's (a noble free American citizen if there ever was one) poetic three-quarter hagiography the worst injustice of biography? Probably not.

With all he went through--'If there is a worse place in Hell, I am in it,'--he would have automatically sounded very fine that day. (The best voice of Lincoln to appear lately seems to be that of David Grubin's PBS "House Divided," the story of Abraham and Mary Lincoln. Whoever it is gets a lot right, a folksy voice without being a caricature. No, I'll even say, without researching who did the voice, --okay, David Morse--that, you can feel it, he got it exactly right. And likewise, it's not for no reason that John Chancellor's voice is such a fine part of the Ken Burns series. The former newscaster's voice--this writer grew up listening to him--does not have any local color, but brings about the right subconscious.) It is a human inability of physical time and space that the witnesses of The Gettsyburg Address cannot render the sound of the voice well for us, and it almost seems odd for the visitor at Gettysburg National Military Park to find so much real and tangible and to be left with that final piece of history vanished.

I myself, driving back from parts north in New York State helping my mother move out of her office and then visiting my father's house to sort through things after his passing, encountered Gettysburg and its battlefield on an August evening underneath a gibbous moon, an auto tour that started in light and ended finally in pitch darkness as I finally entered the cemetery looking for where he had spoke. A Police car, just as I came in the gates to read the first placard, pulled near and the officer came out, just as I was tantalizingly close. Politely, I did as asked at this hushed and venerable place.

Researching later on-line, it seems there is some contention as to where the platform was where Lincoln spoke that day in November, cloudy we are told. It seems there would be something to indicate the spot, but the historical marker, placed just so, reveals that the actual place was three hundred yards away, up at the crest of a hill, not in the military cemetery but in Evergreen Cemetery. It was dark out, and I drove back to Washington.

But still, his voice. What would he have sounded like that day? His words, so careful, I cannot imagine him speaking them quickly and without some sort of muffled soul behind them. Dealing with broad issues, rather than small nit-picking legal argument or issue where each side jockeys in miniscule finely detailed spaces a normal person would quickly become tired and confused in, he would not have been treading carefully and lightly. The issue, it seems, was finally clear, or at least he figured he might as well make it so now, about it being, really, about government, as we all know, 'of the people, for the people, and by the people.' The two sides of the matter were clear, and there had been a great amount of bloodshed and enemy fighting since Kansas.

He would have sounded sad, sensitive, firm, and not namby pamby, and to say so is to fall far short of description. Lots of people, and he famous for being revealed as a fellow who cried over a single fallen bird, sympathetic enough a character to literally pull a pig out of mud a pig was stuck in, had died by that point. He did not cry as he spoke, nor is there any word that he filled up, or faltered anywhere, such was his constant immersion in it all. He did not stop anywhere as he spoke. He just said the beautiful composition that he himself had come up with.

It was, suddenly, a terribly modern moment. And those who have tried to speak it, trying to sound like him, seem to fall far behind in time, as if stuck in some cartoon past of the past itself, that imagines great utterances without the flesh of the day and the spirit of living people who found themselves not in some position to make a grand speech full of pronouncements but in actual real life, in real time, at a real and scary place with lots of clear probably horrifying physical evidence as to what had happened less than five months before. To say nothing of the great smudge of lasting horror that Civil War would have had, holding on to every living person in the country at the time, more or less, memories within that could not be erased. The country was still all in the very middle of it, and each day must have been hard for everyone, let alone Lincoln.

The modern moment, and somehow, appropriately, not even caught on film, the only picture of him sitting down, next to Lamon, having just, or about to, utter something about 'that won't scour.'

One of those beginnings of modernity, like Kennedy, like The Beatles, and yet, we don't have it recorded, except what he wrote on paper, in pencil and in ink from his own pen, and from newspaper accounts of the time. I'd say it must have been a pretty good show.

So say it to yourself sometime. Read it aloud. Imagine you are him, the man who wrote it and who said it. Think of all the distance he travelled, what he might have felt like that day, but even if he didn't feel so well, he handled it fine.

His best qualities were attributes of all of us, all of sharing and capable of employing, and so, The Gettysburg Address, as symbol and as form, and in its very delivery, lives on in us.