"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."
Abraham Lincoln Quotations
A Letter to a Bereaved Mother
