President Abraham Lincoln’s Address At the Dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery Gettysburg, Pennsylvania November 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 here on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it 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 can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation 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.
Note: The Gettysburg Address text above is known as the "Hay" or "second draft" version. It was probably made by Lincoln shortly after his return from Gettysburg and its phrasing more closely matches contemporaneous accounts of the speech than the "Nicolay" or "first draft" version. Both today are in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
The other three known manuscript copies of the Address were written by Lincoln for charitable purposes well after the November 19, 1863, event. One copy, written for Edward Everett, the orator who spoke for two hours at Gettysburg, immediately prior to Lincoln’s Address, is at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. Another copy, requested by historian George Bancroft, is at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. The fifth copy, made for Col. Alexander Bliss, is the version that is most often reprinted today. The original is in the Lincoln Room at the White House in Washington, D.C.
