Abraham Lincoln - Lincoln Tomb - Springfield, Illinois
Posted by: 
BruceS
N 39° 49.381 W 089° 39.339
16S E 272715 N 4411489
Over the entrance to the Lincoln Tomb is a bronze plaque with the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln.
Waymark Code: WM905V
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 06/07/2010
Views: 16
The Gettysburg Address was delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The text of the speech is:
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
Within the Tomb in the burial chamber is the quote "Now he belongs to the ages" which has been attributed to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton at the time of Lincoln's death.