In honor of the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, President Obama hand-wrote his thoughts to pay tribute to the historic remarks.
The essay has been submitted for an exhibit at the at the Lincoln Presidential Library, where former Presidents Clinton, Carter and H.W. Bush have also submitted their contributions, along with other notable essays from Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, General Colin Powell, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
President Obama wrote:
“In the evening, when Michelle and the girls have gone to bed, I sometimes walk down the hall to a room Abraham Lincoln used as his office. It contains an original copy of the Gettysburg Address, written in Lincoln’s own hand.
“I linger on these few words that have helped define our American experiment: ‘a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’
“Through the lines of weariness etched in his face, we know Lincoln grasped, perhaps more than anyone the burdens required to give those words meaning. He knows that even a self evident truth was not self executing; that blood drawn by the lash was an affront to our idealism; that blood drawn by the sword was in painful service to those same ideals.
“He understood as well that our humble efforts, our individual ambitions, are ultimately not what matter; rather, it is through the accumulated toil and sacrifice of ordinary men and women — those like the soldiers who consecrated that battlefield — that this country is built, and freedom preserved. This quintessentially self made man, fierce in his belief in honest work and the striving spirit at the heart of America, believed that it falls to each generation, collectively, to share in that toil and sacrifice.
“Through cold war and world war, through industrial revolution and technological transformation, through movements for civil rights and women’s rights and workers rights and gay rights, we have. At times, social and economic changes have strained our union. But Lincoln’s words give us confidence that whatever trials await us, this nation and the freedom we cherish can, and shall, prevail.”
Clare Kim