I’ve been thinking about Gettysburg this weekend. It strikes me now and then how that battle—that turning point in the war that kept this nation, as we know it, alive—happened leading into the Fourth of July weekend.
The Gettysburg Address was not given on the Fourth of July. It was given in November of 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, in the middle of the battlefield. The war was not over. Generals Meade and Lee were still dancing around one another in northern Virginia. Less than a week after the address, General Grant would lead a successful assault on Missionary Ridge, driving General Bragg’s force out of Tennessee, south into Georgia. The tide was turning, but the outcome of the war was very much in an uncertain space.
It was in the midst of this uncertainty and grief that President Abraham Lincoln delivered the short address, brief remarks following the dedication’s keynote speaker. That it’s become such a transcendent piece of our national scripture speaks to the eternality of the words. We are not always grieving the loss of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, but we are often confronted with the simple, earnest truth that it is up to us, the living, to be dedicated to the unfinished work of building and maintaining this country.
Here’s the address. Happy Independence Day.
Fourscore 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 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 here 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 19th, 1863
