Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address, one of…
November 1863 CE
Although not the day's primary speech, Lincoln's carefully crafted address will come to be seen as one of the greatest and most influential statements of American national purpose.
In just two hundred and seventy-one words, beginning with the now iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," referring to the signing of the Declaration of Independence eighty-seven years earlier, Lincoln describes the USA as a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and represents the Civil War as a test that will decide whether such a nation, the Union sundered by the secession crisis, can endure.
He extols the sacrifices of those who died at Gettysburg in defense of those principles, and exhorts his listeners to 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.
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