During the first three days of July 1863, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Gettysburg Civil War Cemetery on this day, November 19, 1863. Famously, Lincoln drafted his speech on the back of an envelope on the train ride to Pennsylvania. He later wrote out five copies of the text, one of which is in the Cornell University Library archives.
Cornell’s copy of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is one of five known copies in Lincoln’s hand, and the only copy owned by a private institution. The other four copies are owned by public institutions: two at the Library of Congress, one at the Illinois State Historical Library, and one in the Lincoln Room at the White House.
May your career in law be dedicated to the proposition “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
