Following the three-day Civil War battle, Gettysburg was left in shambles. The townspeople were left to care for more than 50,000 dead, wounded and ill. Many of the casualties were put to rest in hastily dug graves; some were just not buried. The situation so distressed Pennsylvania Gov. Andrew Curtin that he convinced a Gettysburg attorney to buy land for a proper burial ground for Union dead. This became Gettysburg National Cemetery.
The cemetery was dedicated in November, just four months after the famous battle. The main speaker was Edward Everett, a politician, statesman and orator from Massachusetts. Everett’s resume was awesome, and his list of experience was impressive: U.S. House member, governor of Massachusetts, U.S. minister to England, president of Harvard University, U.S. secretary of state, U.S. Senate member and an unsuccessful third-party vice presidential candidate in 1860. Everett delivered a two-hour address at Gettysburg. President Lincoln followed Everett at the podium to deliver a few appropriate remarks.
“Four-score and seven years ago,” the President began his now-famous Gettysburg Address. He spoke just two minutes and uttered a mere 272 words. He considered the talk a failure. The world has judged it an eloquent masterpiece.

“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 this 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 here dedicated 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.”