Address by President Lincoln

Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the equality of all men, the United States was fighting a great civil war that tested whether such a nation could endure. On a battlefield of that war, a portion of the ground was being dedicated as a final resting place for those who had given their lives so the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there, beyond any added human power. The living were called instead to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought there, to draw increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that their deaths would not be in vain, that the nation would have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.

Wilmington, North Carolina · United States