|
I have been working on this essay to read at 94th Annual Bingo Hall Festival celebrating the founding of my village. It is about how the Civil War must of looked to somebody back there then. I am still tinkering with it. I think it could use a poofread or a joke maybe. TIA.
-----------------------
Fourscore and eight years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new country, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal also women.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure or last. We are meet on a great battlefield of that aforemention war. We have come to dedicate a part of it as a final resting place for those that died here that the nation might live and go on forward into different centuries in the future. This we may, in all propriety do, as we may or shall. But in a larger sense or context, as a manner of speaking, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hollow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hollowed it far above our poor power to add or detract or multiply. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, because this is a small village in the past, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us the living, we here be 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 that died here but are not here now accept in spirit shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, and with the people shall not perish from the planet we like to call the earth. Thank you, Bingo Hall Festival, and good night. (applause, cheers, etc.)
|