NOVEMBER 19, 1863 - One hundred fifty years ago today U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered his now famous Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony of a national military cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The address was delivered four and a half months after 7,500 soldiers died in a bitter battle fought on the hills and fields of the small, southern Pennsylvania community. Lincoln's remarks, which lasted just over two minutes, followed a two-hour long speech by former Secretary of State Edward Everett, whose oration was suppose to be the primary address that day. However it was Lincoln's address that captured the purpose of the Civil War in just 272 words, and which has become a significant part of American history. The following day Everett wrote to Lincoln, "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself, that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." 

The text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is short and worth re-reading often:

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 this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.