Gettysburg Address

Submitted by ub on

Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. This is a brilliant speech delivered by President Abraham Lincoln, one of our finest Republican national leaders.
It may also be one of the best speeches in US history. It was delivered by Mr. Lincoln during the American Civil War on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, at the dedication of a National Military Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA, just over four months after the Union army defeated the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted address could possibly be one of the best speeches in our nation's history. Abe Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality and redefined the Civil War as a struggle, not merely for the Union, but as a new birth for freedom that would bring true equality to all citizens, ensure democracy in government and create a unified nation in which individual state rights were no longer dominant.

-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 so 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 here 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.-

ITS AMAZINGLY SHORT - 10 SENTENCES AND DELIVERED IN LESS THAN 3 MINUTES.