Lincoln, Gettysburg, and Now

Sometimes, my words – however thoughtful – are inadequate. As winter passes, the mind drifts to Lincoln in 1863. Recall his words that November 19, delivered at Gettysburg.

Lincoln was ill, he knew not how ill. The prior July, with help from the heroic “20th Maine” led Joshua Chamberlain in the Battle of Little Round Top, the Union had prevailed. Still, the casualties topped 51,000. Just the number is numbing.

On November 18, Lincoln felt sick, headache, fever, but duty called. Not one to complain, always pushing through, he went to Gettysburg on the 18^th, that night wrote his famed Gettysburg Address, 372 words, three minutes to deliver, epic.

The address he delivered the next day was this:

“Four score3 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. 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 their 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 and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln then sat down, soon returned to the White House, and was diagnosed with Smallpox. He was laid up – in bed – for weeks. But for his time and us, he pushed through.

Three simple points.

First, the first line goes to Jefferson, 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they were endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life liberty and the pursuit of happiness…”

Lincoln’s biggest influences, as he was born in 1809, were the Bible and our Founders, many still alive when he reached 10, 11, 12. He revered them all.

Second, did we not just experience those last lines? Did we not just see a “new birth of freedom” in 2024, and will we not need to remember that?

Finally, looking back and forward, what does Lincoln’s epic address mean to us today? Sometimes words are inadequate, but he still guides us: Look forward, understand the stakes, value liberty and equality, and how we got here. “Fight, fight, fight!” That is the core of it, right there. 

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).