Exit to Hear the Greatest Speech written by a President

On the 156th Anniversary of Abe Lincoln's Death...


EXIT 32n On I-270 TO Route 15 to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania


"Ok Kids, put down the Tik Tok and listen.  The Chinese eavesdroppers will not appreciate this bit of history.  It’s about a 5 year period in American History where six hundred thousand Americans fought and died in their own back yards. It is about a battle for freedom and union. And while more Americans died in the Civil War as the Revolution, World War One and World War Two combined, America afterwards became a country that led the world.  It was a country who would die for democracy.

On a warm afternoon in November, four months after of a great battle between Americans in 1863, a tall bearded gentleman rose to speak these words in his high pitched, barely audible voice. President Abraham Lincoln was dedicating a vast graveyard.  It is to this day filled with soldiers from the United States.


Abe Lincoln’s speech came after other speeches that went on and on. His speech by contrast was brief. It was  scribbled on one page.   The President himself had written it.


The New York Times later remarked that the speech was inconsequential.

Ever since, The Gettysburg Address has been considered one of the greatest speeches ever written — certainly by an American Leader.  It occurred on November 19, 1863 just a few miles east of the upcoming Exit.  Get off now if you want to experience the words on the battlefield and farm yards of Gettysburg. Gettysburg Battlefield is now a National Park.

​Abe looked up across a quiet crowd. Most of the trees were bare.  Horses whinnied in the distance. Quietly with a slight breeze blowing, Abe Lincoln began:


“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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate—we cannot 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.
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“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 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.”

Now think about it kids… Lincoln said that soldiers die for the country so that those citizens that survive may live in a democracy for the people -- governed by the people.


Does anything on TikTok even compare!


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