Lincoln’s Gettysburg vision

Many polls over the years have revealed that President Abraham Lincoln, who guided the United States during turbulent times in the 1860s when the nation in the midst of a civil war, is generally regarded as one of the top presidents in our history.

As such we recognized him and others on Presidents Day this week.

Lincoln, a self-made man, received some formal education, became a lawyer after reading a very comprehensive book on the law and had a great vision for the United States.

Nevadan Wally Earhart portrays Lincoln much in the same way McAvoy Layne assumes the persona of author and newspaperman Mark Twain, who spent some of his time in the Comstock during the 1860s before heading to California.

After speaking at Saturday’s Lincoln Day dinner in Fallon, we can’t but help ourselves in repeating Lincoln’s most famous speech given at Gettysburg months after one of the bloodiest battles was fought in July 1863. His spoken words from that address still ring true today, perhaps even more so considering the state of affairs in Washington, D.C.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon 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 here 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.

Editorials written by the LVN Editorial Board appear on Wednesdays.