Remembering Lincoln on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address

One-hundred and fifty-eight years ago today, November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave a brief address at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to honor the 50,000 soldiers who died at the battle fought there a few months earlier. In what may be the greatest understatement in the history of speech making Lincoln wrote, "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here . . ."  In just 271 words, Lincoln delivered one of the most memorable speeches in U.S. history.

In the address, the President referenced the signing of the U.S. Constitution and its promise of liberty and equality for all men. He honored and remembered the many soldiers who sacrificed their lives during the war, and challenged his audience to not let those soldiers die in vain and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The 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 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.

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