The Gettysburg Address

From Bill Bennett's American Patriot's Almanac:

In the autumn of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln received an invitation to give a speech at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where a few months earlier Americans had fought one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The battlefield was being dedicated as a cemetery for soldiers who had died there. Would Lincoln come help honor the dead? The president accepted the invitation.

In the following weeks, Lincoln worked on his speech but did not get a chance to write it all down before the time came to travel to Gettysburg. He finished it there the night before the ceremony. The next morning, November 19, he made a few final changes and a clean copy.

A short time later, the president mounted a horse, joined a procession to the burial ground, and took his place on a wooden platform for the dedication. Thousands of people had gathered on the battlefield. The main speaker of the day, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours. When Everett was through, the president unfolded his single-page manuscript and approached the podium. He spoke for only two minutes. Many in the audience thought he was just getting going when he suddenly finished. Lincoln himself was unsure of the oration’s success. (“Lamon, that speech won’t scour!” he reportedly told a friend.) But with fewer than 300 words, Abraham Lincoln had given the greatest address ever delivered on American soil.

The Gettysburg Address still reminds us that thousands have died defending an ideal on which our country was founded—that all people are created equal. The dead can be honored only if the nation lives up to that ideal, Lincoln asserted. By devoting ourselves to it, and by defending it when necessary, Americans ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Every day, Bill Bennett provides via email--for free--a reading from his American Patriot's Almanac. You’ll read about heroes, their achievements, and key events that took place “On This Day” in American history. Click here to subscribe.

And of course I can't leave this subject without reproducing the speech:

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 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 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.

Wow.