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Address by President Lincoln at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery on November 19, 1863 (posted in cemetery):

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 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 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.

Click HERE if you are interested in reading the Declaration of Independence, HERE for a chronology of events leading up to the signing (including photographs of original documents), or HERE if you are interested in reading Thomas Jefferson's account of the circumstances leading to it.

Click HERE if you are interested in reading biographies on our founding fathers.

Click HERE if you are interested in reading the Constitution of the United States and its Amendments.

Click HERE if you are interested in reading Dr. Martin Luther King's speech, "I Have A Dream".