The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago, the nation's founders created a new nation on this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. During a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure, people gathered on a great battlefield to dedicate part of it as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated beyond any added human power by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there. The living were called instead to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that their sacrifice would not be in vain, that the nation under God 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.

Pennsylvania · United States