Shall Not Perish

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 battle-field 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.

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln, the son of an uneducated farmer, spoke those words at the dedication of a cemetery for those who died at the Battle of Gettysburg. Today people do not really understand what Lincoln was. He was a man from humble origins, with little formal education, who still managed to become the president of a nation. The rest of the world simply could not comprehend this. This was not a man born to wield power. This was not a man of the elite. This was not a man born to the right family with all the right connections.

This was the son of uneducated farmers.

He just did not fit the European ideal of leadership. Which is at least part of the reason that Britain considered intervening in the American Civil War until quite late in it. But this man, given to depression (they called it melancholy then), still hoped to save the union even when things looked their worst. In 1864 he had his cabinet sign a sealed envelope. Inside was this:

"This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probably that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards."

Abraham Lincoln, to me, is a shining example of the triumph of hope. That hope shall not perish.