Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has always been one of my favorite speeches. I love the fact that some blowhard gave a 2 hour speech while dedicating the cemetery and most people (unless you are Corey, who is a history teacher) don't even remember his name or what he said. But you remember Lincoln's speech, a brilliant, concise, and precise 269 words lasting a little over 2 minutes.
"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon 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 this 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 this earth."
One of the tour guides at Gettysburg National Cemetery was dressed in a civil war uniform and I overheard his description of the carnage during the 3 day battle. It was hard to listen to his stories of the 48,000 dead bodies strewn across the battlefields, and the condition of the corpses when they were brought to the cemetery.
Most of the bodies were not identified and were buried in mass graves marked by the state unit in which they belonged. As we toured the battlefields and I thought about all of the death and destruction of the civil war, it made me appreciate Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address even more.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has always been one of my favorite speeches. I love the fact that some blowhard gave a 2 hour speech while dedicating the cemetery and most people (unless you are Corey, who is a history teacher) don't even remember his name or what he said. But you remember Lincoln's speech, a brilliant, concise, and precise 269 words lasting a little over 2 minutes.
One of the tour guides at Gettysburg National Cemetery was dressed in a civil war uniform and I overheard his description of the carnage during the 3 day battle. It was hard to listen to his stories of the 48,000 dead bodies strewn across the battlefields, and the condition of the corpses when they were brought to the cemetery. 
Most of the bodies were not identified and were buried in mass graves marked by the state unit in which they belonged. As we toured the battlefields and I thought about all of the death and destruction of the civil war, it made me appreciate Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address even more.
