Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War
Westport Camp # 64
Kansas City, Missouri
The Gettysburg Address
November 19, 1863
Abraham Lincoln
16th President of the United States
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.
