Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

The Battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of America’s Civil War. In July 1863, a Confederate army of 75,000 men faced the 83,000-man Union Army. More men fought and died in this battle than in any other before or since on American soil. The Union suffered 23,000 casualties; the Confederacy suffered 25,000. Of those casualties, 8,520 Union soldiers were killed or missing; 9,750 Confederate soldiers were killed or missing.

Lincoln visited the battlefield to dedicate a cemetery for the victims of that great battle. His short, two-minute speech was delivered over 160 years ago on November 19, 1863.

How it happened: In October 1863, President Lincoln received the same invitation that was sent to hundreds of people, requesting attendance at a dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg.

Col. Clark E. Carr, a confidante of several U.S. presidents and a member of the commission that organized the event, later admitted that commissioners scrambled to send a more personal invitation after Lincoln indicated he would attend.

Asking the president to deliver a “few appropriate thoughts,” Carr said, was “an afterthought.”

The dedication’s featured speaker was Edward Everett. A former secretary of state, U.S. senator, Massachusetts governor and Harvard president whose nationwide tour helped to save Mount Vernon as a national shrine, Everett was considered the great orator of his time.

Everett spoke for over two hours. Then Lincoln got up and his speech lasted two minutes.

A Matthew Brady photo of the crowd at Gettysburg caught a blurry image of Abraham Lincoln before he delivered his famous address.

There are several copies of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s handwriting.  Each is slightly different.  The Bliss Copy, presented below, is the most commonly used version and is featured on the Lincoln Memorial.

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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not 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.