Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg
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 battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate top 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 their 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.
November 19, 1863.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
"Undoubtedly there were many in the audience who fully appreciated the beauty of the President's address, and many of those who read it on the following day perceived its wondrous character; but it is apparent that its full force and grandeur were not generally recognized then, either by its auditors or its readers. Not until the war had ended and the great leader had fallen did the nation realize that this speech had given to Gettysburg another claim to immortality and to American eloquence its highest glory."—From the monograph on the Gettysburg Address, by Maj. William H. Lambert.
Bayard Taylor, born in Kennett Square, Chester County, Pennsylvania, on the 11th of January, 1825. Died in Berlin, Germany, on the 19th of December, 1878. His boyhood was passed on a farm near Kennett. He learned to read at four, began to write at an early age, and from his twelfth year wrote poems, novels and historical essays, but mostly poems. In 1837 the family moved to Westchester, and there and at Unionville he had five years of high-school training. His first poem printed was contributed to the Saturday Evening Post, in 1841, and those to the New York Tribune from abroad, written in 1844, were widely read and shortly after his return were collected and published in Views Afoot, or Europe Seen With Knapsack and Staff. With a friend he bought a printing office in 1846, and began to publish the Phoenixville Pioneer, but it was as a poet that he excelled above most other vocations.