Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Independence Day is many things to many people. For some, it’s a time to reflect on the accomplishments of our great country before firing up the grill and, well, overeating. As comedian Jim Gaffigan joked (or not), “I normally don’t have a burger, brat, and a steak, But it is [the] Fourth of July.”
Whether or not you feel like it is your God-given right to overindulge or agree with those who would praise The Gettysburg Address as “among the most inspiring pieces of rhetoric ever written,” it would be hard not to agree that it is “brief where others ramble,” it’s “incisive and poetic where others fumble crafting clay metaphors.”
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 272 words long, was composed in snatches on the backs of envelopes in train cars and in stolen moments by a man holding America together by the seams, seemingly through the grace of God alone.
Jeffrey Blehar reminds readers in National Review:
Words that Make Our Nation Great
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 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.
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