Five Drafts

For my birthday the other day, one present Mrs. Nasty got me is one of those bathroom reading, Cliff Clavinish tomes, a little book that has amusing and interesting information.

As I was leafing through the book, which is titled Contrary to Popular Belief: More than 250 False Fact Revealed, the other day, I stopped on page 35 because of the statue of the Lincoln Memorial and the long title "Abraham Lincoln did not write the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope while riding the train to Gettysburg."

My interest was piqued. I read on.

Apparently, Lincoln started a rough draft on Sunday, November 8, 1963, which is close to two weeks before the famous address on the battlefield. The author says that his final draft was on "executive letterhead and probably finished the night before the dedication ceremony." And his secretary reportedly says he didn't writing at all on the train ride to Pennsylvania.

The truth is that, according to the author, "He wrote five drafts."

That's right. Let me spell it out nice and slowly for you:

F

i

v

e

D

r

a

f

t

s.

I remember hearing that story about Lincoln writing the address on the train from somewhere, and the fact that this myth might have aided and abetted and could still aid and abet people's rationalizations (especially college writers) that they write well "under pressure" pisses me off.

FIVE DRAFTS.

Here in the Prairie State where Lincoln idolatry is lively and also a lucrative affair, I wonder how many schoolchildren have been told this lie about Honest Abe churning out a cherished piece of polished oratory without the need for multiple drafts, revision, editing, and proofreading.

What's even richer about where the myth came from is from whom it originated. Lincoln's son, Robert, is supposedly the perpetrator who "claimed in a letter that his father wrote the speech on the train" in 1885.

So the son of Honest Abe was a liar.