Edexia for AP English

In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln turns a ceremony for the dead into a charge to the living. Through an allusion to the nation's founding, a reversal in which he denies that his audience can dedicate the ground, and a closing series of parallel phrases, Lincoln argues that the soldiers' sacrifice will mean something only if his listeners finish the work they began. Lincoln opens by reaching back to 1776 with "Four score and seven years ago," a biblical phrasing that gives the founding the weight of scripture. By describing a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," he frames the war as a test of that founding promise rather than a quarrel between regions. A crowd standing in a cemetery is invited to see the dead as defenders of an idea. The center of the speech is a reversal. Lincoln has come to dedicate a cemetery, yet he repeats "we can not" three times, refusing to "dedicate," "consecrate," or "hallow" the ground, because the soldiers have already consecrated it "far above our poor power to add or detract." By lowering the importance of his own words, Lincoln raises the importance of his listeners' actions. Lincoln closes with one long sentence that piles up obligations: the living must ensure "that these dead shall not have died in vain" and that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The parallel structure makes democracy sound simple and complete, and ending on "the earth" widens the stakes from one battlefield to the world.