The Gettysburg address
This is what great
writing is about. Lincoln was late to his
speech at Gettysburg and hurriedly wrote what would become the Gettysburg
address in his coach, on the back of an envelope he found in his pocket. When
he finished, he stuffed the envelope in his stovepipe hat. After the speech, he
apologized to the assembled dignitaries for what he saw as the poor of the
speech he had just made.
“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
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, Gettysburg
Address, November 19, 1863
