The Gettysburg Address

The Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches of all time. I can remember all the way back in I think it was seventh grade where we had to recite the Gettysburg Address for extra credit points. I could not recite it all the way, but I still got the points. Anyway, the Gettysburg Address is probably one of the most famous speeches. Abraham Lincoln did a great job with describing the government and coming together as one.

The Gettysburg Address stated "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure" (Lincoln 402). This is a great quote because the Gettysburg Address happened right in between the Civil War. Lincoln knows this war is bad, but we have to stick with each other and keep the government right where it is. Now this is different from what Thoreau's Civil Disobedience in a way that I will describe. Thoreau's story consisted of him saying that he did not want a government or for that matter a better one if anything (Thoreau). This is different from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address because Lincoln was all about the government. He was our sixteenth president, while Thoreau and Emerson wanted nothing to do with the government. Lincoln basically said that we or the nation need to stick together and get through this. Emerson's story was about how we relied on ourselves or individual work (Brugman). Lincoln's Gettysburg Address said basically that we needed to rely on each other to get through this war. You also need to rely on yourself, but the focus that Lincoln was trying to get to is that the government should have some say in the decisions people make in their everyday life. Another quote from Lincoln is "and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" (Lincoln 402). This quote is just dealing with Lincoln and him saying that the government that they have there will not disappear during this war.

Bibliography

Thoreau, Henry David. "Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - with Annotated Text." The Thoreau Reader. Web. 25 Jan. 2012.

Brugman, Patricia. "Individual and Society in 'Self-Reliance'." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

Lincoln, Abraham. "The Gettysburg Address." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 402. Print.