19 November 2008
145th Anniversary of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Famous speech delivered at dedication of Soldiers' National Cemetery
Abraham Lincoln, America’s 16th president, delivered his most famous speech — the Gettysburg Address — 145 years ago, on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
America was still in the throes of a civil war. Four months earlier, at the beginning of July, some 51,000 Confederate and Union soldiers had been captured, wounded or killed in the Battle of Gettysburg. President Lincoln went to Gettysburg to speak at the dedication of a new cemetery for the Union war dead.
In his brief remarks, Lincoln noted that the Founding Fathers conceived of the United States as a place of liberty where “all men are created equal.” The lives of the men who died at Gettysburg could be hallowed only if the nation lived up to the proposition that all of its people, regardless of race, were in fact equal, he said. And Lincoln stated his resolve “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which proclaimed freedom for all slaves living in states still in rebellion. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which officially abolished slavery, was adopted in December 1865, eight months after Lincoln was assassinated.
America will celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday in 2009.
Following is the text of the Gettysburg Address as printed on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington (also see the Library of Congress Web site on the Gettysburg Address):
The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Fourscore 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 this 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 powers 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.
