Abraham Lincoln's Birthday

"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
02/12/2015 at 10:10 • Filed to: None

Convenience dictates that we combine the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington into a single day of sales at the dealership and the mall. But Lincoln deserves better than that. Here is a performance of A Lincoln Portrait , Aaron Copland's stirring tribute to Lincoln, with narration by James Earl Jones. And below is perhaps one of the greatest speeches ever written, the Gettysburg Address.

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.

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 here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for 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 can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. 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 gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

A photograph of Lincoln taken on February 5, 1865 in the studio of Washington, D.C. photographer !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . It was to have been used as the model for the official Presidential portrait. Lincoln would be assassinated two months later.