HAPPY 4th Of July From All Staff of Goodtimes Radio Studio & Goodtimes Music Respect Studio
The Gettysburg Address
On Nov. 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dedicated a national cemetery
on the battlefield at Gettysburg, where a few months earlier over 7,000
men had died. Although Lincoln's address received little attention at the
time, it has since come to be esteemed as one of the finest speeches in
the English language.
"Fourscore 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 cannot dedicate, we
cannot consecrate, we cannot 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."
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