"Four score and seven years ago..."

Do you remember those words? I think just about every kid had to memorize them at one point in his or her life. Abraham Lincoln's speech on November 19, 1863 was just 10 sentences long, and was over in under four minutes. Most of the people in the audience, weary from standing for hours in Gettysburg, barely realized what he was speaking about before Lincoln was finished. That was evident from the scant and hesitant applause that he received. Lincoln returned home thinking he had bombed it. It wasn't until the Gettysburg Address was reprinted in newspapers across the Union that it really caught on and people saw the tremendous value in the words he spoke.

Do you remember what it was about? If you had asked me before yesterday, I probably would have said that it was all about slavery. I would have been wrong. (I was probably confusing it with his other milestone, the Emancipation Proclamation.)

Not until I was reading an account of the speech to my daughter last night did I remember what it was all about. It was about the historic and tragic battle there in Pennsylvania, in which 40,000+ Union and Confederate troops were killed or wounded during the three days of fighting. More so, though, it was about what they had fought, and died, for.

Lincoln considered the American Civil War a test of not only the Union, but the whole foundation on which the Union was founded -- the idea that all men are created equal. He knew that if the principle couldn't be upheld for the slaves, then freedom and liberty for any of us might someday be at risk. When you have men deciding who should enjoy the blessings of liberty and who should not, then those decisions are subject to the frailties of men.

In some ways, we are still fighting those same battles today. So, it is important to read those words again today, as the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth is noted by our lawmakers and executives. Read them yourself, and remember who has gone before you and why they offered up their lives.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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 on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, 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 it can never forget what they did here. 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. 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, 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."