On this day, November 19, 1863, eight score and one years ago ...

[mahatmakanejeeves]

You guessed it, didn't you?

The way things are going around here, I half expect someone to alert on this as a Republican talking point.

Gettysburg Address


One of only two confirmed photos of Lincoln (center, facing camera) at
Gettysburg taken about noon on November 19, 1863; Lincoln spoke some
three hours later. To Lincoln's right is Ward Hill Lamon, his bodyguard.

The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. It is one of the best-known speeches in American history.

{snip}


Union soldiers dead at Gettysburg,
photographed by Timothy H. O'Sullivan,
July 5–6, 1863

{snip}

Text

Shortly after Everett's well-received remarks, Lincoln spoke for only a few minutes. With a "few appropriate remarks", he was able to summarize his view of the war in just ten sentences.

Despite the historical significance of Lincoln's speech, modern scholars disagree as to its exact wording, and contemporary transcriptions published in newspaper accounts of the event and even handwritten copies by Lincoln himself differ in their wording, punctuation, and structure. Of these versions, the Bliss version, written well after the speech as a favor for a friend, is viewed by many as the standard text. Its text differs, however, from the written versions prepared by Lincoln before and after his speech. It is the only version to which Lincoln affixed his signature, and the last he is known to have written.

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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate—we can not 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 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.
—Abraham Lincoln

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Sun Nov 19, 2023: On this day, November 19, 1863, eight score years ago ...

Sat Nov 19, 2022: On this day, November 19, 1863, seven score and nineteen years ago

Tue Nov 19, 2019: On this date, November 19, 1865, seven score and sixteen years ago....

[NNadir]

1. Sad, given that Government of the People, by the People...

for the People is perishing from the Earth.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

2. Edward Everett was a most respected and popular orator.

Everett was impressed by Lincoln's speech.
Everett was a very popular speaker and noted official:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Everett#Teacher,_writer,_and_speaker
Everett took up his teaching duties later in 1819, hoping to implant the scholarly methods of Germany at Harvard and bring a generally wider appreciation of German literature and culture to the United States. For his Greek class he translated Philipp Karl Buttmann's Greek lexicon. Among his students were future Speaker of U.S. House of Representatives Robert Charles Winthrop, presidential son and future U.S. Representative Charles Francis Adams, and future philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson had first heard Everett speak at the Brattle Street Church, and idolized him. He wrote that Everett's voice was "of such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance, that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beautiful and correct of all instruments of the time."

In 1820 Everett was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. That year he became editor of the North American Review, a literary magazine to which he had contributed articles while studying in Europe. In addition to editing he made numerous contributions to the magazine, which flourished during his tenure and reached a nationwide audience. He was also instrumental in expanding Harvard's collections of German language works, including grammars, lexicons, and a twenty-volume edition of the collected works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom Everett had visited in Weimar and whose works he championed on the pages of the Review.

Although Everett was renowned as a speaker and although his address was the kind that American audiences of the time appreciated, he recognized in Lincoln's speech the qualities of a truly "great work": "I should be glad," he wrote Lincoln, "if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes" (Everett to Lincoln, 20 Nov. 1863).
https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/121everett.html

After his speech at Gettysburg, Lincoln confided to a companion and to Everett that he considered his two minute address to be a failure.
Contrast this with the attitude of today's president-elect who probably would characterize both Lincoln and Everett as "losers" were they alive today. Somewhere in the skills of diplomacy loyalty and leadership and qualities of honor and integrity, humility is one I look for.