The Battle of Gettysburg was fought between July first and third in 1863. The Union victory repelled the last serious Confederate attempt to invade the North, and the battle marked the turning point of the Civil War. Gettysburg was the war’s bloodiest battle, with combined casualties exceeding 50,000.
In the fall of 1863, a national cemetery was established for Union casualties, and a ceremony was scheduled for the formal consecration of the site. Gettysburg resident David Wills, a principal figure in the establishment of the cemetery, wrote to invite President Lincoln to attend the consecration ceremony. Wills wrote, “It is the desire that, after the Oration [by principal speaker Edwar Everett], you, as Chief Executive of the nation, formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.”
The President journeyed by train from Washington, DC, to Gettysburg on November 18. He spent the night in the home of David Wills. The following day, after Everett’s two-hour oration, Lincon delivered his 271-word address. The President’s “few appropriate remarks” on November 19 have come to be seen as one of the most notable speeches in American history and one of the greatest statements of our national purpose.
The full text of Lincoln’s address, just ten sentences long, always deserves our careful consideration:
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 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.
Just as we were tested by the Civil War, we have been tested many other times to determine if our nation and its founding principles can endure. We have met those tests, but many more will come. The work to defend freedom is a noble task that has no end.
Each test will be a challenge. Each will demand dedication and a willingness to sacrifice. But each test will also be a priceless opportunity to help secure a new birth of freedom, and a new confirmation that a nation like ours, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all persons are created equal, can endure and shall not perish from the earth.
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