Lincoln Memorial: Emancipation & Gettysburg Address

The Gettysburg Address is engraved in full.

Quick Facts

Amenities

1 listed

Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits

Speaking at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, the final resting place of thousands of Americans who died on that field, Abraham Lincoln offered this brief but consequential speech. The speech was a turning point in his war strategy in that, for the first time, he began to openly speak of the abolition of slavery as a desired outcome of the war, a "new birth of freedom." The mural above depicts an allegory of emancipation in the center.

Inscriptions
Four score and seven years ago our fathers bought 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 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 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 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.