President Obama's tribute to the Gettysburg Address (Photo: The White House)
President Obama paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address in an old-fashioned way, with a handwritten note.
"Lincoln's
words give us confidence that whatever trials await us, this nation and
the freedom we cherish can, and shall, prevail," Obama wrote in the
note posted by the White House on Wednesday night, the 150th anniversary
of the speech at Gettysburg.
Obama's note is 272 words, the
length of the Gettysburg Address (approximately; different
transcriptions of Lincoln's speech have slightly different lengths).
Obama's note in full:
"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 those words
meaning. He knows that even a self evident truth was not self executing;
that blood drawn by the lash was an affront to our idealism; 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 revolution and technological transformation, through
movements for civil rights and women's rights and workers rights and gay
rights, we have. At times, social and economic changes 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."
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