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Summarizing the Gettysburg Address
In this task you will summarize the main points of the Gettysburg Address and express its message in your own words.
Write a summary for each paragraph of the Gettysburg Address in the table. Refer to these vocabulary words e as you
work on this task.
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Student Summary
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continenta
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 Rave 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.
mop

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered remarks, which later became known as the Gettysburg Address, at the official dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, on the site of one of the bloodiest and most decisive battles of the Civil War. Though he was not the featured orator that day, Lincoln’s brief address would be remembered as one of the most important speeches in American history. In it, he invoked the principles of human equality contained in the Declaration of Independence and connected the sacrifices of the Civil War with the desire for “a new birth of freedom,” as well as the all-important preservation of the Union created in 1776 and its ideal of self-government

Though Lincoln was extremely frustrated with Meade and the Army of the Potomac for failing to pursue Lee’s forces in their retreat, he was cautiously optimistic as the year 1863 drew to a close. He also considered it significant that the Union victories at Gettysburg and at Vicksburg, under General Ulysses S. Grant, had both occurred on the same day: July 4, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. When he received the invitation to make the remarks at Gettysburg, Lincoln saw an opportunity to make a broad statement to the American people on the enormous significance of the war, and he prepared carefully. Though long-running popular legend holds that he wrote the speech on the train while traveling to Pennsylvania, he probably wrote about half of it before leaving the White House on November 18, and completed writing and revising it that night, after talking with Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had accompanied him to Gettysburg

On the morning of November 19, Everett delivered his two-hour oration (from memory) on the Battle of Gettysburg and its significance, and the orchestra played a hymn composed for the occasion by B.B. French. Lincoln then rose to the podium and addressed the crowd of some 15,000 people. He spoke for less than two minutes, and the entire speech was fewer than 275 words long. Beginning by invoking the image of the founding fathers and the new nation, Lincoln eloquently expressed his conviction that the Civil War was the ultimate test of whether the Union created in 1776 would survive, or whether it would “perish from the earth.” The dead at Gettysburg had laid down their lives for this noble cause, he said, and it was up to the living to confront the “great task” before them: ensuring that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”