"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."
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
