161 YEARS AGO TODAY
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, perhaps the most famous speech in American history.
Worth remembering this year, this day most of all.
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
“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.”
I hope a time comes soon when these words will ring true for us as well:
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as
God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s
wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do
all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations."
No republican today would endorse that speech. But they certainly would endorse the speech where Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said, "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."