A Reading of the Gettysburg Address
The only known photo of President Lincoln at his Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863. In this detail, Lincoln is seen in the center, head bared and probably seated, with his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon on the left. Library of Congress hide caption
Learn More about the Photo and View an EnlargementWednesday marks the 140th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Actor Sam Waterston reads the speech, which was written to commemorate the Union soldiers killed in the Civil War.
The Gettysburg Address
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 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.