On this day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a brief speech at Gettysburg, PA. The Gettysburg Address was short, yet has been hailed as one of the greatest ever.
The Gettysburg Address was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863. This was during the American Civil War, and took place four and 1/2 months after the Union armies defeated the armies of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg.
The main speaker at the dedication was not even Lincoln. It was Edward Everett, who had previously served as Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, U.S. Representative, Governor of Massachusetts, president of Harvard University, and been a Vice Presidential candidate.
Abraham Lincoln was added as an afterthought. Despite this, his two minute Gettysburg Address, which was the second given that day, took the spotlight away from everyone else.
Here is the full text of the Gettysburg Address.
Fourscore 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.
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