Gettysburg Address - Eagle Point National Cemetery - Eagle Point, OR
N 42° 27.867 W 122° 47.232
10T E 517494 N 4701367
This plaque containing the Gettysburg Address is located in the heart of Eagle Point National Cemetery, a veterans cemetery.
Waymark Code: WMMTF9
Location: Oregon, United States
Date Posted: 11/02/2014
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Located within
Eagle Point National Cemetery are the graves of thousands of servicemen and women who've dedicated their lives to the military and are buried here for all to remember them by and the sacrifices for which many of them have made in order for we Americans to enjoy the freedoms we have today. Located on top of a knoll along with other memorial markers is a freestanding plaque of the Gettysburg Address which was given by President Abraham Lincoln at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. It reads:
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT LINCOLN
AT THE DEDICATION OF
THE GETTYSBURG NATIONAL CEMETERY
NOVEMBER 19, 1863. Fourscore 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 cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot 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 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."
The following text comes from AbrahamLincolnonline.org and reads:
There are five known copies of the speech in Lincoln's handwriting, each with a slightly different text, and named for the people who first received them: Nicolay, Hay, Everett, Bancroft and Bliss. Two copies apparently were written before delivering the speech, one of which probably was the reading copy. The remaining ones were produced months later for soldier benefit events. Despite widely-circulated stories to the contrary, the president did not dash off a copy aboard a train to Gettysburg. Lincoln carefully prepared his major speeches in advance; his steady, even script in every manuscript is consistent with a firm writing surface, not the notoriously bumpy Civil War-era trains. Additional versions of the speech appeared in newspapers of the era, feeding modern-day confusion about the authoritative text.