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Lincoln Delivered Gettsyburg Address 151 Years Ago Today

By John Dodge

CHICAGO (CBS) -- On this date in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln wasn't even the featured speaker as thousands gathered to venerate the fallen soldiers at Gettysburg.

According to Carl Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years" the president had replied to an invitation to attend the dedication of the National Soldiers' Cemetery at Gettysburg a few weeks before the event. The decision for him to speak was actually an afterthought.

The main orator, Edward Everett, a former senator and governor from Massachusetts, had already been set.

Lincoln arrived by train the evening before and dined with a local family, before taking his papers and retiring for the evening around midnight.

On Nov. 19, a crowd of perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 had gathered for the dedication. Just a few months before, an estimated 165,000 soldiers gathered for the battle on July 1-3. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is often described as turning point for the Union.

The Cincinnati Commercial reporter described the scene: "The President rises slowly, draws from his pocket a paper, and, when commotion subsides, in a sharp, unmusical treble voice, reads the brief and pithy remarks."

The reporter wrote in his notes, "The President, in a firm, free way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half-dozen words of consecration."

The address has become one of the most memorable in American history. There are five known copies of the speech in Lincoln's handwriting, each with a slightly different text. This is the most commonly cited version:

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.

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 battle-field 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 nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not 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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