Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, given November 19, 1863 on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA
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 have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this 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 this earth.
Abraham Lincoln’s fifth and final draft of the Gettysburg Address, written in March 1864 as a favor for a friend to help raise funds for the Union cause. Because of the apparent care in its preparation, and in part because Lincoln provided a title and signed and dated this copy, it has become the standard version of the address and the source for most facsimile reproductions of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It is the version that is inscribed on the South wall of the Lincoln Memorial. This copy is kept on view in the Lincoln Bedroom on the second floor of the White House.
