Gettysburg Address

Ceremony kicks off at 10am at President Lincoln’s Cottage in northwest Washington. Get your kids there and they’ll score a free coin. Otherwise, you can buy them at banks and financial institutions.

On this day in 1863, now seven score and seven years ago, President Abraham Lincoln went to the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsyvlania. Four-and-a-half months earlier, the Union armies had delivered a crushing blow to the Southern forces in the Battle of Gettysburg. On both sides, the losses were staggering—casualties exceeded 20,000 for both North and South, while each suffered several thousand deaths.

This rare photograph from November 19, 1863, shows a hatless Lincoln seated to the left of center. (Look at the gentleman standing in the tall hat in the middle and look just slightly left.)

That now world-famous Gettysburg Address by Lincoln was not the “highlight” of the occasion. The main speaker, Edward Everett, was the best orator of the time and spoke for some two hours. Indeed, in his brief speech, Lincoln wrongly said: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” though his next line was spot on accurate, “but it can never forget what they did here.” (Everett would later write to the president: “I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”)

The full text of that speech is forever etched in the psyche of America and is quoted from the fifth of five extant copies of the address in Lincoln’s handwriting (it differs slightly from earlier versions and may reflect, in addition to afterthought, interpolations made during the delivery):

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.

Post a Comment

0 Comments