our 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 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, and for the
people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863
