What is The Great Task?
President Abraham Lincoln was invited to the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, just several months after the Union army defeated Confederate forces the previous July in that famous three-day battle. Casualties on both sides were staggering. President Lincoln wrote his speech not long before the ceremony, and many at the time were surprised at its brevity. It took him only about two minutes to deliver his remarks.
“The Great Task” is a phrase from that speech we have come to know as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. As much as he was speaking to the crowd gathered that day, President Lincoln speaks to all of us today, as well, assigning us our Great Task.
There are several versions of the speech that exist, and the words vary slightly from text to text. The following transcription of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, emphasis added for this page, is cited below as the “Nicolay Copy.” It is not the version I was required to memorize in 8th grade. The grammar and punctuation were not corrected.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon 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 dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow, this ground– The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, to stand here, we here be dedica-ted to the great task remaining before us — that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, 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.
Abraham Lincoln, Draft of the Gettysburg Address: Nicolay Copy. Transcribed and annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. Available at Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division (Washington, D.C.: American Memory Project, [2000-02]), http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html.
Acknowledgements
The photograph at the top of the page depicts the President Abraham Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. It was taken by Casey Horner and is available at Unsplash.com.
The photograph at the bottom of the page in the footer was taken by Pete Chacalos and is available at Pixabay.com. It depicts, in the desktop view, on the right, the hill just south of Gettysburg, PA, that we know today as Round Top or Big Round Top. The lower hill to the north of Big Round Top, on the left side of the photo in the desktop view, is what we call today Little Round Top.
This area was the sight of Civil War battle on the second day of fighting in and around Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Confederate forces coming from the south and west, moving from the right side of the photo toward the left, engaged Union troops that were at Little Round Top and Union reinforcements that formed a battle line from Little Round Top toward the west, that is, toward you, the viewer. The hill today appears much as it did during the Civil War – there were no trees on the western slope and northward, affording a good vantage point west and north to Gettysburg. At the bottom of the slope was an area of large boulders we know today as Devil’s Den, and it was here that Confederate snipers took up protected positions shooting at Union soldiers toward the top of the hill. In the photograph, the area of Devil’s Den can be seen through a small break in the treeline.
Though outnumbered, Union forces prevailed that day, and Confederate troops withdrew, leaving the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg for July 3, with the famous Pickett’s Charge of the Confederate army across a large open field just outside of town. Again, the Union army prevailed. In the decades after the Battle of Gettysburg, a memorial observatory, what many tourists refer to as “the castle”, was built atop Little Round Top and you can see it in the photo.