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Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

President Abraham Lincoln gave a speech on November 19, 1863, some five months after the Battle of Gettysburg, at the dedication ceremony for the Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg. This ceremony was to honor the war dead .

The President's speech , shown below, became universally known as the Gettysburg Address.

Abraham Lincoln's speech is regarded as the greatest speech ever made in America.

In a speech of just 271 words, taking less than 3 minutes, Abraham Lincoln set out his vision for the future by emphasising the need for human equality as contained in the Declaration of Independence. Abraham Lincoln positioned the Civil War as a conflict to deliver freedom for all its citizens. Abraham Lincoln also stressed the required dominance of the united nation over individual states's rights.

There are five known copies of the Gettysburg Address which differ in small details from each other and also differ from newspaper reports of the time. The version shown below is commonly accepted as being closest to the actual words Abraham Lincoln spoke that 13 th day of November at Gettysburg in the year 1863.

Some 18 months later, on June 1 st 1865, a Senator Charles Sumner gave a eulogy for the slain President Abraham Lincoln . In it, the Senator called Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address a "monumental act."

Senator Sumner went on to say that Abraham Lincoln was wrong when he said that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here."

The Senator concluded that

"The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech ."

A classic instance of the "pen & the word" being mighter than the sword.

Read on for the Gettysburg Address :

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

"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 battle-field 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."