Is Gettysburg Address the most famous speech of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln?
I can remeber when I was still in elementary school learning all about Abraham Lincoln and also having to memorize his Gettysburg Address I can still recite it. 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 Gettysburg Address is Lincoln’s most remembered and memorialized speech, however historians point to his second inaugural address as the most enduring. At the time of President Lincoln’s re-election, the Civil War was winding toward its end and the predominant question among most citizens involved how the Northern and Southern States should be reunited. In answer to that question, Lincoln spoke from his heart after taking the oath of office for a second time on March 4,1865: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Within that paragraph Lincoln called for an embrace of the Southern States and a return to a United States of America. Many historians deem Lincoln’s second inaugural speech the greatest in American history.
