The opening lines are among the most familiar words in our history.
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.
Today is Dedication Day, the date on which Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at a ceremony to dedicate the opening of the cemetery at the Gettysburg Battlefield in 1863. On that day, Lincoln was not the featured speaker. The “few appropriate remarks” he was asked to make took about two minutes. Edward Everett, the most famed orator in America, was featured speaker and spoke for two hours. But which Gettysburg Address do we remember?
And no, it wasn’t written in haste on the back of an envelope. Lincoln carefully drafted the speech on official stationery.
Here is a link to the National Park Service’s Gettysburg pages on the cemetery
http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getttour/tstops/tstd4-23.htm
This is a link to the Library of Congress online Exhibition about the Gettysburg Address:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/gadd/
Lincoln made five copies of the speech. Two are at the Library of Congress. One is kept at the White House: This is the complete text of the Address, as recorded by Lincoln, in what is called the “Bliss Copy,” generally accepted as the standard version and the one which is inscribed at the Lincoln Memorial.
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 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.
