The Perfect Tribute

'The Perfect Tribute' is a short story written by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, and is also her best known work. It is about the past U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln, depicting him as writing and delivering the Gettysburg Address, then concluding his speech was an utter failure. Later, he comforts a Confederate Captain as he dies in a prison hospital, and the Captain, who does not recognize him, praises the Address as "one of the great speeches in history". The wildly popular story was assigned reading for multiple generations of school children in the United States and may be the most popular book ever published about Lincoln.