Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, prepared and stated the Gettysburg Address in November 1863. It was a speech offered by the president during the American Civil War during a dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was just four short months before that the Union armies had defeated the forces of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. 

The speech is considered one of the greatest speeches in American history. It took just 2 minutes in length from start to end. It was the words in the speech that offered the principles of human equality offered by the Declaration of Independence and now with the Union battle won it was offered a "new birth of freedom" 

His famous four score and seven years ago statement referrers to the Deceleration of Independence. "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

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.

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