Text is divided into Problem and Resolution. At the beginning of the Gettysburg Address Lincoln admitted that he could not dedicate or consecrate the ground, such activities are not in the realm of rhetoric. Perhaps they are in the realm of magic or religious incantation. Therefore, Lincoln moved on to what he could do in his speech, namely to use the sacrifice of the men who died at Gettysburg as a challenge to the nation to have "a new birth of freedom."
A text is composed of Problem and Resolution. Problem has two component parts: Disorder and Order. The Order that Lincoln posits is that of the nation founded 87 years previously, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The Disorder is the conflict that threatens to destroy the Order, namely "a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." Now the dynamic of text is created when Order and Disorder are juxtaposed and militate against each other. The reader sees this discord and is driven to seek a resolution so the reader is driven to move on to some resolution of this conflict.
There are three parts to the Resolution. The first part is Blame. Who is at fault for the Disorder? Lincoln does not point exactly to the Blame, he implies the Blame. It is implied that a lack of dedication to the cause of the new nation is where Lincoln affixes responsibility for the Disorder. He does not affix the Blame just to the South, does he? The Remedy is those who gave their lives so that the nation might live. They are the ones who make the Gettysburg battlefield a sacred place. The final movement in text is Re-order. Notice that it's not the old order which is an ideal. The Re-order is a practical response to the Old order which has undergone a change because of this conflict and in the Re-order is this "new birth of freedom" and it is built on the increased devotion that Lincoln is calling for.
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