Gettysburg Address - 145 years ago

Did you know yesterday was the anniversary of the Gettysburg address?

President Abraham Lincoln delivered the famed Gettysburg Address today during the consecration of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. The 272 word speech, delivered in under three minutes, became one of the most often quoted speeches in history. Beginning with the famous strain “Four score and seven years ago,” President Lincoln’s brief speech evoked the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the spirit of the American Revolution and redefined the Civil War as a struggle to bring true equality to all American citizens.

Here it is:

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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not 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.

What’s really sad is how few schoolchildren today will even have heard of it, much less understand the significance.