Due Thursday, April
4, 2013
Read the Gettysburg Address. Write a paragraph response to each
question (two paragraphs total).
1.
Briefly summarize the speech. What are his major
points?
2.
Why do you think this speech has become one of
the most famous speeches in American history?
The Gettysburg Address
President Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863
“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 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.”
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