America Marks the 150th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address

150 years ago today, it only took 2 minutes for President Abraham Lincoln to deliver what would become the most important speech in American History. 2 minutes! Today, we remember this speech and what it stands for.

But, it took at least a few drafts to get it right. And there are 5 known copies in Lincoln's handwriting.

In the speech, delivered four and a half months after the Union defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Gettysburg, president Lincoln reminded us about the cornerstone of our founding set forth by the Founding Fathers.

Here is the most famous version of the text:

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 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.

I know many of us haven't looked at the Declaration of Independence or Constitution since school, but it's time you do. They, as Lincoln reminded us, are what we are here for.For more about the speech, visit this wonderful site.

Happy birthday Gettysburg Address, thank you president Abraham Lincoln and God Bless America!