Everett, Edward [key], 1794–1865, American orator and statesman, b. Dorchester, Mass., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1811; M.A., 1814). In 1814 he became a Unitarian minister in Boston, but, appointed (1815) professor of Greek literature at Harvard, he went abroad to study at the Univ. of Göttingen (Ph.D., 1817) and to travel. During his professorship (1819–25) he also edited (1820–23) the North American Review. He was a U.S. Representative (1825–35), governor of Massachusetts (1836–39), minister to England (1841–45), president of Harvard (1846–49), and secretary of state in the last four months of President Fillmore's administration (1852–53). Massachusetts elected him U.S. senator, but he resigned in the second year of the term (1854), embarrassed by his old-line Whig attitude of compromise on slavery. In the Civil War he traveled throughout the North speaking for the Union cause and drawing immense audiences. His most famous address, now almost forgotten, was the principal oration delivered at Gettysburg on the same occasion that called forth Abraham Lincoln's enduring Gettysburg Address.
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