Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address

This crowd scene is the only known photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863. Photographers needed time to set up their cameras, and by the time they set up to photograph his actual speech, he was finished. One photographer commented, "Oh, I wish I had a cell phone, but they won't be invented until six score and seventeen years from now!" 🙂 

Anyway: Lincoln's speech got mixed reviews but has become a classic. He used biblical images of new birth and sanctification. He was also, to some people at the time, innovative for believing that the nation was founded with the Declaration of Independence, rather than with the Constitution. 

One more fun fact: the bearded man seated to Lincoln's right is Ward Hill Lamon, his bodyguard. Tragically, Lamon was on assignment to Richmond the night that Lincoln was killed. Later, Lamon wrote two books about Lincoln. I have one downstairs in my Lincoln collection that I started years ago with Henry's Beef 'n' Burger money. 🙂 

"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