On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln spoke for about two minutes at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania — built on the site of the Civil War's bloodiest battle, fought that July. He wasn't even the featured speaker: the main address that day was a two-hour oration by Edward Everett, one of the era's most famous orators. Lincoln's remarks, by contrast, ran to about 272 words. Almost no one at the time expected them to be remembered; Lincoln himself reportedly worried the speech had fallen flat. Instead it became one of the most quoted pieces of political rhetoric in American history.
The speech does something quietly ambitious: it reframes the entire war. Lincoln opens by dating the country's founding not to the Constitution of 1787 but to the Declaration of Independence of 1776 ("Four score and seven years ago"), and to that document's claim that "all men are created equal." That's a deliberate choice — it recasts the Civil War as a test of whether a nation built on that specific principle of equality can actually survive, rather than simply a conflict over states' rights or the Union.
From there, Lincoln argues that the dedication ceremony itself is almost beside the point — the soldiers who died there have already "consecrated" the ground "far above our poor power to add or detract." What matters instead is what the living do next: finish the work the dead advanced, and rededicate the nation to the cause they died for. The speech closes with its most famous line, defining what that cause is — that the nation should have "a new birth of freedom," and that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
There are five known manuscript copies in Lincoln's own hand, with small differences in wording between them. The text below is the "Bliss copy" — the version Lincoln wrote out last, the only one he signed, and the version now engraved on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial and generally treated as the standard text.
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 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.
Source: National Park Service, "Gettysburg Address" (nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/gettysburgaddress.htm) — the "Bliss copy" text, as engraved on the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial.