Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday
Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln, on what would be his 204th Birthday. Abe Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address 150 years ago and every word is still as relevant today as it was when he first said them.
Lincoln was a last minute addition to the program at the battlefield where the principal speaker was the great orator Edward Everett who spoke for two hours… while Lincoln spoke just 270 words in a couple of minutes. In honor of Lincoln’s birthday, his words are shown here. Please read this to someone younger than age 25 who I fear may not know who wrote the Gettysburg Address.
Gettysburg Address November 18, 1863 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.
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