Gettysburg Address still one of the best

One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln penned one of the most powerful pieces of prose in our nation’s history.
His 272-word tribute to the men who died on the Civil War battlefields near Gettysburg, Pa., stands unparalleled in American political speeches. Lincoln used simple but powerful words to communicate with the American people – even as the war still raged on other bloody fields.
First, he set the historical backdrop of this nation’s founding, and the central premise that “all men are created equal.”
Next, he admitted that although it was “fitting and proper” to dedicate the cemetery at Gettysburg, nothing he could do or say would match the glory of those who fought there for a cause they believed in.
And then he gave a charge to those in attendance – to carry on the work of those who fought and died for the noble cause of preserving the new nation. He concluded: “That the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In those 10 sentences, Lincoln moved the thousands in attendance, and his speech has echoed down through 15 decades of American history. In their elegant simplicity, his words still challenge us today.
This week, we celebrate those words. But even more, we celebrate the man. His unswerving commitment to our emerging nation, his innate goodness and his tested character made him the right man to lead the nation and inspire its people at that critical time in our history.
He did that well at Gettysburg.
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Printed below is the text delivered by President Lincoln on Nov. 19, 1863:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon 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 are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of 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 to 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 that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us here to be 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 the dead shall not have died in vain.
“That the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”