Lincoln gave a whole lot of speeches. They’re all worth reading and absorbing, especially if you want to understand the background of the war.
I don’t recall any stump-like repetitive nature to them, either. They seemed fairly unique, well able in each case to stand up on their own.
Things were different then. Political speeches tended to run for hours.
Take a look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates for example. They went on for hours and hours, and were repeated many times in numerous locations.
These guys had to know their stuff.
The above is why, I think, that people were so shocked by the incredible brevity of perhaps the greatest speech in American history, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. (”The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here...”)
At that event, the main speaker was Edward Everett, a renowned orator. He spoke for several hours. Lincoln gave his immortal address in two minutes.
Afterwards, Everett famously told Lincoln that he wished he could have summed up the heart of the matter in two hours as well as he had done it in two minutes.
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Oratory is a lost art. Sure, some were windbags like Everett. But it was a form of entertainment. People used to go to the Courthouse just to watch the attorneys argue their cases. Today, I’ve done my best work in mostly empty courtrooms.
Television changed all of that. There are psychological studies that show we were once equally adept at assimilating information in the auditory and visual areas. Now, the preponderance of learning is done visually.