Tuesday, November 19th, 2013
President Obama's Handwritten Tribute to the Gettysburg Address
http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/president-obamas-handwritten-tribute-gettysburg-address?utm_source=snapshot&utm_medium=email&utm_content=111913-share
One hundred fifty years after President Lincoln delivered
the Gettysburg Address, President Obama penned a handwritten tribute to
President Lincoln's historic remarks. Read his essay below, then share it with
others.
Anniversary Gettysburg
Address
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/11/19/150th-anniversary-gettysburg-address
Here's the full text of President Obama's essay:
In the evening, when Michelle and the girls have gone to
bed, I sometimes walk down the hall to a room Abraham Lincoln used as his
office. It contains an original copy of
the Gettysburg address, written in Lincoln’s own hand.
I linger on these few words that have helped define our
American experiment: “A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.”
Through the lines of weariness etched in his face, we know Lincoln grasped, perhaps
more than anyone, the burdens required to give these words meaning. He knew that even a self-evident truth was
not self-executing; that blood drawn by the lash was an affront to our ideals;
that blood drawn by the sword was in painful service to those same ideals.
He understood as well that our humble efforts, our
individual ambitions, are ultimately not what matter; rather, it is through the
accumulated toil and sacrifice of ordinary men and women – those like the
soldiers who consecrated that battlefield – that this country is built, and
freedom preserved. This quintessentially
self-made man, fierce in his belief in honest work and the striving spirit at
the heart of America, believed that it falls to each generation, collectively,
to share in that toil and sacrifice.
Through cold war and world war, through industrial
revolutions and technological transformations, through movements for civil
rights and women’s rights and workers’ rights and gay rights, we have. At times, social and economic change have
strained our union. But Lincoln’s words give us
confidence that whatever trials await us, this nation and the freedom we
cherish can, and shall, prevail.
The fifth and final copy of the Gettysburg Address, which
President Lincoln wrote in his own hand, is on display in the Lincoln Bedroom
of the White House. Take a closer look of the only version that Lincoln titled, signed,
and dated through the Google Art Project.