Mike Quigley: “7 score and 12 years ago, another gentleman from Illinois went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to dedicate the 4…”

“7 score and 12 years ago, another gentleman from Illinois went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to dedicate the 4- month-old, still unfinished Union cemetery at the site of one of the bloodiest battles in American history. There he would give one of our Nation's defining speeches. Amazingly, President Lincoln's address was not even the main event of that day. Edward Everett, the former president of Harvard, was the event's main speaker, spending 2 hours lecturing about ancient Greece and how that society honored their fallen soldiers. Everett later wrote: I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in 2 hours as President Lincoln did in 2 minutes. In the 2\1/2\ minutes Lincoln spoke, he did more than honor our fallen soldiers. In 272 eloquent words, he reminded us that we live in a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He asked whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. In his address, the President also issued a challenge to his contemporaries and to generations of Americans thereafter, saying: 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. He concluded: Our Nation shall have a new birth of freedom and that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.…”