Abraham Lincoln gave what is perhaps the greatest speech in American history 162 years ago

November 19, 1863. Gettysburg, PA.

Minutes after Edward Everett, one of the great orators of the age, sat down after giving his 2+ hour speech dedicating the Gettysburg National Cemetery, President Abraham Lincoln stood up to give his follow-up address. He had been a last-minute invite, asked by the dedication committee to come to Gettysburg to deliver some "appropriate remarks." What followed in the next two minutes are perhaps the most famous words an American president has ever uttered in a political speech:

quote:

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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.

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While his contemporaries considered the speech to be something of a flop at the time, over the intervening decades the speech gained in both prestige and popularity. To so succinctly summarize and state the reasons for fighting and the stakes involved in the American Civil War required a prose that can hardly be found even in the greatest of speechwriters here in our modern day.


Only confirmed photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg (November 19, 1863)