Gettysburg+Address

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 * Gettysburg Address**

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Gettysburg Address Questions--DOES NOT OPEN AT SCHOOL--MAY USE AT HOME

1. A speech given by **Abraham Lincoln.**
 * The Gettysburg Address Basics**

7. We must keep working to make sure that our **government** doesn’t fail.

 * 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 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 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. **

Gettysburg Address (1863) refers to the Declaration of Independence (1776)-- "Four score and seven years ago..."

Lincoln's mention of the ideals of the [|Declaration of Independence] (liberty and equality) is an indirect attack on the institution of slavery.

He is saying that if the U.S. loses the Civil War, then:
 * all the men who died in the war would have died for nothing
 * the ideals of freedom and equality would be meaningless (and slavery would likely remain)
 * a democratic form of government (of, by, and for the people) would fail for future generations

In essence what Lincoln is saying is that the war is about the future of human freedom, and nothing less!

And it is up to the living to carry on the work of those who died (those who gave their last full measure of devotion).

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