Lincoln's main purpose was to urge everyone to honor those who had died at Gettysburg by striving to maintain the kind of nation imagined by America's founders.
President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln affirmed the principle stated by the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. The massive number of casualties at the Battle of Gettysburg gave impetus to Lincoln's words about preserving the Union and government of the people, by the people and for the people, but those ideas had been central to Lincoln's worldview before Gettysburg.
His closing words of the speech are powerful:
- It is for us, the living ... to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced ... that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here 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.
