President Abraham Lincoln did not often deliver speeches rallying support for the Union war effort. The leading spokesman for the North was Whig statesman Edward Everett of Massachusetts, whose efforts to summarize the federal cause for the benefit of American audiences and foreign readers led to his invitation to deliver the main address on 19 November 1863, at the dedication of a cemetery at the Gettysburg battlefield. After Everett's oration, Lincoln offered some dedicatory remarks:

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...