The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.īut, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. 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. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. The constitution of France, for instance, promises “gouvernement du peuple, par le peuple et pour le peuple.” ×įour 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. It influences not just other speeches but even the core political documents of other nations. In 1850, Theodore Parker, an abolitionist and Unitarian minister, had written about a “government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.” But it is Lincoln’s version that we remember today. Lincoln was not the first person to use a version of this phrase.

of the people, by the people, for the people. (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum) The state acquired the address in March 1944. Over six months, they donated about $50,000, and Chicago businessman Marshall Field III contributed the rest of the $60,000 price. The state’s children helped raise the money. Then in 1943, the owners offered to sell the copy to the state of Illinois for $60,000 (about $950,000 in 2021 dollars) so that it could be made accessible to the public for generations to come. The Everett Copy passed through the hands of several private owners over the next 80 years. These are the page numbers from when the speech was part of the book.) (If you look carefully at the Everett Copy, you can see “57” at the top of one page and “58” at the top of the other. When Everett received the copy of the speech, he bound it in a book along with a copy of his own address to be sold at the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in New York City. Everett later wrote Lincoln that, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”Įverett asked the president for a handwritten copy of his address so that it could be sold to raise money to care for sick and wounded soldiers. ' The main speaker was Edward Everett, one the nation’s best orators. He was simply asked to deliver ' a few appropriate remarks.

Abraham Lincoln was not the primary speaker at the November 19, 1863, dedication of a national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa.

Four score and seven years ago