Gettysburg Address

The greatest terrorist attack in the United States may have been the 5,000 killed at the World Trade Center. But the attack which killed the most Americans in history was the Battle of Gettysburg from July 1-3, 1863. Today we ask "why" when pondering September 11, 2001. And as the cemetery at Gettysburg was being dedicated on November 19, 1863, it's easy to imagine the same question on people's minds in the wake of 51,112 deaths, at the hands of our own countrymen no less. Would this radical nation founded on democracy, still young enough for living grandparents to recall when there was no Union, survive much longer? Here are the words that President Lincoln spoke on that somber day.

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.