Lincoln at Gettysburg

On Nov. 19, 1863, the United States’ relationship to its Declaration of Independence would change forever. Four score and seven years after the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and adopted the Declaration, a new generation of Americans would meet in another part of Pennsylvania — the small town of Gettysburg. President Abraham Lincoln, speaking at the dedication of the cemetery for those U.S. soldiers who had been killed in the battle, redefined the Declaration of Independence and its ongoing importance.

In the bloodiest single battle fought on American soil, Gettysburg became not only a high point of American division, but also, thanks to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a place of national unity and an inspiration for “a new birth of freedom” based on the old Declaration. By drawing on the text of the Declaration of Independence as well as its memory, Lincoln positioned equality as the foremost point in this founding document. Historian Garry Wills explores themes connecting the Gettysburg Address to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to show how President Lincoln used the American Revolution and its key documents to craft a vision of the future of the United States that belonged to the people.

On this anniversary, read a short excerpt from Willis’ book, and then read the words of the Gettysburg Address itself.

Excerpt from Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America

The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit—as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself without overthrowing it. It is this correction of the spirit, this intellectual revolution, that makes attempts to go back beyond Lincoln to some earlier version so feckless. The proponents of states’ rights may have arguments, but they have lost their force, in courts as well as in the popular mind. By accepting the Gettysburg Address, its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America.

Text of 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.