Tuesday Marks 145th Anniversary Of President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

November 19, 2008 3:09 p.m. EST

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - Tuesday marks the 145th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's delivery of now famous Gettysburg Address.

An estimated 15,000 people are believed to have been present on the morning of Nov. 19, 1863 and heard Lincoln give the address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Those words have since become the most famous words in American history and millions of school children have read the words, with untold numbers of them reading the words out loud and even memorizing them.

On Tuesday President George W. Bush attended the reopening of the National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C. and noted that when Lincoln delivered the brief speech of 10 sentences that many Americans were weary of the years of Civil War that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. There was pressure to make peace, even at the cost of preserving slavery, Bush noted.

"President Lincoln understood that liberty is a gift given by the Almighty -- and that peace must not be purchased with injustice," Bush told people at the museum, according to a transcript of his remarks.

Bush gave a brief recitation of America's Civil Rights movement, crediting the Gettysburg Address for inspiring African Americans to act and crediting their actions for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

And now the nation is preparing to inaugurate its first African American president, President-elect Barack Obama. On Jan. 20, Obama and his wife - a descendant of slaves who were freed by Lincoln - and the couple's daughters, will move into the White House, which was built by slaves.

Reprinted below, in its entirety, is:

The Gettysburg Address

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 cannot 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 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.