History of the Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln, on this day in 1863, began his address in Gettysburg:
Four score 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.
With only nine more sentences, he dedicated a new national cemetery, summed up the battle that had taken place there some four months earlier, cast a vision for the future of the Union, and harkened back to the Declaration of Independence four score and seven years previously when Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal.”
The three-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 had been the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, with at least 46,000 casualties among the 160,000 troops. It did not end the war but occurred just past the middle of the almost 4-year conflict. Nevertheless, it was a decisive victory for the North and a turning point, putting the South on the defensive for the rest of the War Between The States. This conflagration represented the largest number of casualties of any American war in history because both sides were counted in the total.
