Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

President Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. Lincoln had gone to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, to dedicate a military cemetery to the Union dead.

President Lincoln wrote the speech himself. Legend says he jotted down the speech on the back of an envelope, while on the train trip to Gettysburg. This myth is no doubt false. Lincoln was a careful and thoughtful man, not prone to impromptu remarks on important occasions. More likely President Lincoln spent hours writing the speech.

The carefully chosen language of Lincoln's Gettysburg address has had a profound effect on the history of the United States.

Text of Lincoln's 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 qave their lives that the 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 so nobly advanced. It is 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 the government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.