Gettysburg Address , a speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln on November 19 , 1863 , at the dedication of Gettysburg National Cemetery near Gettysburg , Pennsylvania . The ceremony abide by Civil War soldiers killed in the Battle of Gettysburg ( July 1-€“3 , 1863 ) . The President ’s abbreviated address followed an oration by Edward Everett , the principal speaker , and was largely ignored at the time . But its eloquent language and its soul-stirring expression of the nation ’s ideals have made it one of the most quoted language in United States history .
Lincoln wrote the address in Washington . He revised it in Gettysburg before delivering the language , and retool it at least four more times for publication . The words Lincoln actually spoke were commemorate by a careful newsman , Charles Hale of the Boston Advertiser :
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new Carry Amelia Moore Nation , conceived in Liberty , and dedicated to the suggestion that all men are created equal . Now we are hire in a great civil war , test whether that Carry Nation or any land so gestate and so dedicated can long endure . We are meet on a great battlefield of that war . We are adjoin to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting shoes of those who here gave their living that that body politic might live . It is totally fitting and proper that we should do this . But in a large sense we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – € ” we can not hallow this ground . The brave men populate and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our pitiful power to add or take away . The earth will little notice nor long recall what we say here , but it can never forget what they did here . It is for us , the bread and butter , rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished oeuvre that they have thus far so nobly carry on . It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the groovy job remaining before us – € ” that from these esteemed stagnant we take increase devotion to that cause for which they here impart the last full measure of idolatry – € ” that we here highly resolve that the numb shall not have died in egotistic – € ” that the land shall , under God , have a new birth of freedom – € ” and that government of the the great unwashed , by the people , and for the people , shall not perish from the world .
