The Gettysburg Address was a speech by U.S.
President Abraham
Lincoln, during the American Civil War, on the
afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers'
National Cemetery in Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union
armies defeated those of the Confederacy at
the Battle of
Gettysburg.
Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to
other presentations that day, came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American
history. In just over two minutes, Lincoln reiterated the principles of human
equality espoused by the Declaration
of Independence and proclaimed the Civil War as a struggle for
the preservation of the Union sundered by the secession
crisis, with "a new birth of freedom," that
would bring true equality to all of its citizens, ensuring that democracy
would remain a viable form of government and creating a nation in which states' rights were
no longer dominant.
Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years
ago," referring to the Declaration
of Independence during the American Revolution in
1776, Lincoln examined the founding principles of the United States in the
context of the Civil War,
and memorialized the sacrifices of those who gave their lives at Gettysburg and
extolled virtues for the listeners (and the nation) to ensure the survival of
America's representative democracy, that the "government of the people, by
the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
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