The Gettysburg Address is a statement about finding the redemption in the dead.

But we need to remember that in that cemetery that day, half those coffins weren't even buried yet.

Graves were still open.

This was a place of death, mass death where Lincoln tried to craft the statement of.

So what does it mean?

It is a kind of elegiac statement that if this war has purpose, if all these dead have died for something meaningful, then it means we are going to redefine this country.

In effect, the Gettysburg Address is saying the First Republic just died here.

It's being buried in those graves.

We together now have to rebuild it.

We have to remake it.

We have to win this war first and then remake it.

Fourscore 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 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 on a dead we take increased devotion to the 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.