Soldiers' National Cemetery contains the graves of more than 6,000 United States servicemen, including 3,580 Union soldiers killed in the Civil War, and nearly half of the Civil War burials are unknown soldiers. A few days after the battle, Andrew Curtin, Governor of Pennsylvania, visited Gettysburg and was deeply moved by what he saw, as bodies of soldiers had been hurriedly buried on the battlefield and some had not been buried at all. Curtin and representatives of Northern states took steps to create a national cemetery, and beginning in October 1863, bodies were carefully removed from the field and re-interred here, a process that took five months. On November 19, 1863, before the burials were completed, government officials, battle veterans, and citizens assembled to dedicate the cemetery, and near the end of the ceremonies President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address from a platform near the site of the Soldiers' National Monument.