Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of a cemetery for soldiers who died in the Civil War. He honored their sacrifice and called for the nation to continue the fight for freedom and democracy.
November 19, 1863
Seventy years ago our fathers begat on this continent a new nation, conceived in freedom and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
We are now engaged in a great civil war, to see if that nation or any other nation so conceived and so dedicated can last long. We meet on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate part of it as a final resting place for those who died here so that the nation may live. This we can, in all fairness, do. But in a broader sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot sanctify this soil. The brave men, living and dead who have struggled here, have consecrated far above our meager ability to add or subtract. The world will little notice nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us the living, here we devote ourselves to the great task still before us – that from these honored deceased we draw increased devotion to that cause for which they have here given the last full measure of devotion – that we strongly resolve here that these dead do not will be died in vain, that this nation will have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, because the people will not perish from the earth.
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