Abraham Lincoln 150 years past

The Gettysburg Address is one of the most revered presidential speeches in US history and it was delivered by Abraham Lincoln, likely the most beloved of US presidents, on November 19, 1863. The speech is eloquent, moving, and concise. It is inscribed on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC and rare is the visitor to that city has not looked upon it. 

The speech was given by Lincoln, during the height of the Civil War, to dedicate a battlefield become national cemetery that would entomb American soldiers killed by American soldiers, and he was highly distraught that the Union might become divided under his leadership. He stood on that battlefield as he spoke.

A link of famous Americans reading the speech is here 

http://www.learntheaddress.org/#DCVYPrjizqw

The text of  the address is given below.

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.