Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was barely longer than two hundred words, but may be one of the most well-known speeches in American history. Lincoln began by speaking of how America was a nation founded by men who sought freedom and equality, and those ideals were being tested at that time, by the Civil War. Lincoln made an attempt to dedicate the battleground to the men who lost their lives, in classical Greek funerary tradition, but found such a prospect to be a challenge; he believed that what would be said at Gettysburg would be forgotten, but the battle and its impact would live on. The men who died at Gettysburg, Lincoln asserted, fought for America; their deeds were immortal, and Lincoln could not let their deaths be in vain. The government, Lincoln said, had to live on, for it was a representation of the American people. The country had to prevail. Lincoln's handful of words about the Battle of Gettysburg, which followed speech by Edward Everett that spanned hours, made one of the largest impacts on American history and rhetoric, forever remembered as a mournful yet hopeful declaration of the perseverance of the Union.
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