Abraham Lincoln - The Pennsylvania State Memorial - Gettysburg, PA
N 39° 48.447 W 077° 14.111
18S E 308661 N 4408776
Yet another permanent copy of the Gettysburg Address can be found here at the largest monument in Gettysburg. The bronze tablet has been here for over 100 years!
Waymark Code: WMC51P
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Date Posted: 07/26/2011
Views: 7
There are over 90 of these oblong bronze tablets at this monument. This is the only one that does not have the names of Pennsylvanians who fought here during the great battle. The entire base base is lined with bronze tablets listing the Pennsylvania regiments and batteries and the names of over 34,000 Pennsylvanians who participated in the battle, except for the one here. The tablet is on the front side or western end, first one closest to the stairs or furthest left. In case you never read it or heard of it the Gettysburg Address was a "few, appropriate remarks" offered up by President Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, four and one half months after the Confederates were beaten down at Gettysburg. He memorialized the soldiers that fought and essentially, consecrated this site as holy or hallowed ground.
The text of that speech on that day:
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 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.