27/11/2021
Four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln joined a large crowd to dedicate the Soldiers’ National Cemetery on the afternoon of November 19, 1863. After the delivering of prayers and the playing of songs, the crowd listened intently to a nearly two-hour speech by the orator, Edward Everett. Then, following a hymn, “The Consecration Chant,” President Lincoln stepped forward to deliver the Dedicatory Remarks. In just a matter of 271 words, Lincoln said everything that a broken nation needed to hear. He began by invoking the historical memory of the United States, addressed the conflict, then turned his focus to the present, and in many ways to us. For a speech that Lincoln predicted few would “long remember,” the Gettysburg Address should speak to us all today.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon 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.”
