Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

On this date, November 19, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, delivered one of the most famous and well-known speeches in the history of the USA and perhaps in the history of the entire world. The occasion was the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA. There are several known copies of the speech in Lincoln’s handwriting, each with slightly different text. Contrary to popular belief, evidence indicates that Lincoln did not write the speech as he rode a train to Gettysburg, but rather prepared the speech in advance as was his custom for major speeches. The copy presented below is perhaps the best known of the different versions.

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

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 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.

I had the privilege of playing the part of Abraham Lincoln and delivering the Gettysburg Address in 2007 for one of the patriotic musicals we did at the First Church of the Nazarene in Prescott, AZ.

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