From the Burlington Weekly Hawkeye (Burlington, Iowa), 28 November 1863

Clipping of the Day

From the Burlington Weekly Hawkeye (Burlington, Iowa), 28 November 1863, page 3:

DEDICATION OF GETTYSBURG CEMETERY.--The New York Dailies of Friday last contain accounts of the ceremonies at the dedication of the soldiers cemetery on the battlefield of Gettysburg. The crowd was great, the ceremonies imposing. The Oration of Mr. Everett was such as might be expected from his master mind. It is very long, and its deliver must of course have delighted all who heard it.

The dedicatory address of the President was brief and, as we think, most happily conceived. We print it below in full:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this Continent a new Nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. [Applause.] 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 are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of 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 power to add or detract. [Applause.] The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. [Applause.] It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. [Applause.] 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here shall highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain [applause]; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom; and that Governments of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. [Long continued applause.]

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NOTE: Today marks the 141st anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. For more information on this historic speech, see: Today in History, November 19: Gettysburg Address (Library of Congress, American Memory)