Nobody knows all their names or the circumstances that led them to join the military and fight in our nation's wars but we set aside today to remember them. President Lincoln said it best but thousands of others have matched his words with words of their own spoken in honor of the fallen.
President Abraham Lincoln
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 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."
He spoke those words at Gettysburg and the people there so little remembered his speech that most never recalled what he said. He wrote it down though.
For all of them.
From me.
When so many in and out of government are twisting the meaning of the words that founded this country and which men and women lived, fought and died for, it is hard sometimes to remember that what we have is worth fighting for and if it comes to it, dying for.
1 comment:
It's a shame that the Gettysburg Address was a monstrous lie. The only way it could have been true was if Lincoln had addressed it to the Southern dead.
I respect the dead Union soldiers as honorable men serving a flawed cause, but it was they who were crushing a bid for independence.
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