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The Gettysburg Address

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Abraham Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address (1863)
At the centre of all that Americans value is freedom. This includes political, religious, economic and personal freedom etc., and many Americans regard their society as the best and freest society in the world. Freedom is a value that is deeply rooted in the history of the country, as it goes back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and later also the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The ideal in these is that liberty and equality go hand in hand, but this is not always the case. The American Civil War is one the greatest examples on this. The war had its roots in the question about slavery, and it ended up costing the lives of more Americans than all of the U.S.’s subsequent wars together. On the afternoon of November 19 1863, four months after one of the Civil Wars bloody fights, the president at that time, Abraham Lincoln, holds a speech in which he encourages the people of America to end the war. Furthermore, he reminds the audience of the ideals on which America was founded, and how the Civil War is threatening them. Last but not least, Lincoln honors the fallen and encourages people to finish their unfinished work.
Abraham Lincoln frames his speech in a historical perspective and introduces two of the most important American values already in his first sentence of his speech. “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.” (P. 1, ll. 1-2). With this introduction to his speech, Abraham Lincoln presents two of the fundamental values of America: equality and liberty. He begins his speech saying ‘fourscore and seven years ago’. This is a very noble way of saying ’87 years ago’ and it refers to the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. Combined with the use of

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