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Historic Document
Lincoln's
President Abraham Lincoln was invited, some say only as an afterthought, to the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where several thousand dead from the Civil War's most gruesome battle only four months before had been interred.
He was asked to deliver a short speech following the keynote speaker, the great contemporary orator Edward Everett. Lincoln is said to have put off writing the speech, finally doing so on the back of an envelope on the train to Gettysburg. Following Everett's two-hour discourse, Lincoln rose and delivered his two-minute speech, whose carefully chosen words still echo across the generations since, and pluck at America's heartstrings.
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