WASHINGTON   –  “During the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth this year, November 19th will mark the 146th anniversary of the most historic two minutes in Lincoln’s presidency, and perhaps the most significant two minutes of any presidency in our history.

The Gettysburg Address is remembered for two reasons – first, as the most eloquent elegy of American oratory and, second, as the encapsulation of our reason for being (and for persisting as) a nation dedicated to the principle of freedom.

Americans know Lincoln’s words by heart. Lincoln tells us that, “Four score and seven years ago,” our nation was founded in a period of great strife, and it requires us to honor the men and women who founded and serve our nation by continuing to preserve, advance and defend the cause of liberty.

With Americans serving around the world in the uniform of our country, there is never a reason to forget about them or about the truly great value of the freedoms for which they are fighting. 

His oratory was aimed at the families gathered in a Pennsylvania field to honor the fallen soldiers in one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.  His speech has resounded through our history, reminding us that democracy is a powerful force for freedom when our union was at its most fractured and fragile.

And Lincoln was right: democracy did prevail.  It was a painful process for our nation, it took decades, and it reminds us how precious our union is today.  Yet in remembering Lincoln, we are also bound to do our part to keep our state and our union strong.  How can we do this?  By being engaged in our communities, by engaging in civil debate, by fighting for our rights to the freedoms endowed to us by our Constitution and our Creator, and by preserving the liberty with which we have been entrusted.
If Lincoln were alive today, he would see a nation with government grown gigantic.  He would marvel at the two million federal employees.  He would gasp at our $11 trillion debt.  But he would not doubt our greatness as a people.

He would also see a grown nation where his America was only in its difficult adolescence.  He would see opportunity unsurpassed by that in any nation in the world.  And he would see a free society that is still struggling to remain true to its fundamental values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – attempting to carefully balance individual rights and the rule of law. 

What he would want us to remember today, I think, is something he said in the Gettysburg Address – he titled it “Dedicatory Remarks.” In the speech, he urges his audience to devote themselves to “a new birth of freedom” so that “government: of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.”

Those words today hold the same promise they did in 1863: that we can do great things to honor the men and women who sacrifice in the line of duty.  Not through our government, but in our own personal lives, Lincoln wanted us to endeavor to improve our nation in order that it may endure.  We have great challenges to meet even today, but Lincoln would be confident we could overcome them.

One of the most important reasons to celebrate Lincoln in this bicentennial year is to remind ourselves of Lincoln’s singular love of our country and its democratic ideals; and to that end I will be working in Congress to declare November 19th as Dedication Day.  On the annual anniversary of the delivery of the Gettysburg Address, we ought to have a national opportunity to revisit his most historic, and most inspiring words.

If you’d like a refresher, please visit my website at www.house.gov/emerson where you can find links to the National Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and the text of the Gettysburg Address.”


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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.