 |
| A Framed Parchment of the Gettysburg Address (like this one) hung in our home for many years. |
From large home to skid shack, wherever we lived it was prominently displayed in the kitchen by our table for all to see.
Even before I could read, I would ask Mom to read it out loud for me and she would stop whatever she was doing and do just that. (even when she knew I made the request just to stall from doing something I didn't want to do).
Next to Abraham Lincoln himself, I don't think anyone could have recited it better or with more depth of feeling than she did. I didn't understand all of it, but the way Mom read it made me long to know it's true and deeper meaning.
(I wonder how many ways that affected me?)
 |
| Abe Lincoln at Gettysburg |
Gettysburg Address
by Abraham Lincoln
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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not 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
November 19, 1863
LINK to INFO "Gettysburg Address" at History.com Website
