For the Independence Day, 2013 just passed --
The Gettysburg Address
Fourscore 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 the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion,--that we here 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 the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. [Long continued applause.]
~ Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863
(The text above is the one Gary Wills (Lincoln at Gettysburg, The Words that Remade America, 1992), considers to be the closest to what Lincoln actually said (read) on November 19, 1863. The applause notations are from the trustworthy AP report of Joseph L. Gilbert, who was present and taking down Lincoln's words as he said them. Lincoln's three-minute speech reimagined the work of the founding fathers, and placed the Declaration of Independence, and its valuing of equality and freedom, above the Constitution as America's founding document.)
