An Anniversary of Words

One-hundred-fifty years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln stood at Gettysburg to deliver a speech that has become part of our national identity. A man of simple means who was born in Kentucky and lost his mother when he was nine years old, Abraham Lincoln became a president of extraordinary intelligence, humanity, and eloquence. Visiting Gettysburg, the first time about fifteen years ago, and again in 2011with friends from New Zealand (see photos below), I walked the battlefield and witnessed the place where President Lincoln spoke the words that we celebrate today. It was an humbling experience to be there, and it is equally humbling to read and recall these words again. The spirit of the Gettysburg Address is relevant to all battlefields where people have given their lives for freedom, wherever that may be in the world, however elusive the goal.

The Gettysburg Address

The Gettysburg National Cemetery was dedicated by President Abraham Lincoln a brief four months after the Battle. Lincoln's speech lasted only two minutes, but it went into history as the immortal Gettysburg Address. 

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth. "

More information about President Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address.