Notes

=Citations=
 * "Gettysburg Address." wikipedia. 2007 . Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 15 Feb 2007


 * "The Gettysburg Address." The Gettysburg Address By Abraham Lincoln. 2007 . Abraham Lincoln Online. 15 Feb 2007

=Notes=
 * Lincoln used the word "nation" five times (four times when he referred to the American nation, and one time when he referred to "any nation so conceived and so dedicated"), but never the word "union," which might refer only to the North—furthermore, restoring the nation, not a union of sovereign states, was paramount. Lincoln's text referred to the year 1776 and the American Revolutionary War, and included the famous words of the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal".


 * The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863) forever changed the little Pennsylvania town – and, for that matter, the history of the United States. The battlefield contained the bodies of more than 7,500 dead soldiers and several thousand horses of the Union's Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia. The stench of rotting bodies made many townspeople violently ill in the weeks following the battle[citation needed], and the burial of the dead in a dignified and orderly manner became a high priority for the few thousand residents of Gettysburg. Under the direction of David Wills, a wealthy 32-year-old attorney, Pennsylvania purchased 17 acres (69,000 m²) for a cemetery to honor those lost in the summer's battle.


 * In brief remarks, the president did a good job of playing on his major themes regarding the war. He spoke of a nation "conceived in liberty," and continually put the emphasis on the soldiers who have died in the war. "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here," said the president, who looked thin and appears to be effected by the slow progress of the war in recent months.


 * Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," Lincoln referred to the events of the American Revolution and described the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to dedicate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to consecrate the living in the struggle to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

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