PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN
on the heights of Gettysburg, on the 19th of November, 1863, I heard him deliver before a multitude of people the following eloquent and philosophic address in dedicating the great National Cemetery:
"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 battlefield 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 the 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 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 so far nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be 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: and that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth."
I saw
GENERAL GRANT
at Appomattox on the 9th of April, 1865, I hear again these phrases of the silent soldier to General Lee: