Gettysburg Address, Nov. 19: Will Our Republic Endure?
Today is the 159th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address. The famous Battle of Gettysburg, the great Union victory that was “the bloodiest single battle” of the Civil War but also began turning the tide for an ultimate victory against the Confederacy and slavery, occurred on July 1-3, 1863. Months after that battle, President Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for the war dead. Facing an exhausted, sorrowful crowd, Lincoln delivered ten sentences that made history.
“Fourscore 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 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 here 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.”
With two stolen elections, an economic crisis, and a looming world war, many Americans are wondering if this nation will endure. It will, but only so long as there are people who love it enough to risk everything for it. Freedom-loving citizens in Iran and Brazil have turned out in the streets to demand their rights. 159 years ago, men fought and died on the field near Gettysburg to prove that all men are created equal and that the American experiment could endure.
We are not on a physical battlefield now, shooting guns at each other (pray God it stays that way), but we are at war—a war for the soul of this nation. Lincoln‘s Gettysburg Address is still a clarion call today, a call to all of us American patriots to stand up for the principles of the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence; and, if we do that, no matter what, America will endure.