Happy birthday, Mr. Lincoln

One of the small joys of living in west central Illinois is that nearly every town you visit has a connection to Abraham Lincoln.  Stories occasionally appear in newspaper columns by local historians.  Some stories are apocryphal; others substantiated by documentation.  Families who have lived in the area since Lincoln's day pass down stories through the generations.  Buildings have plaques saying that Lincoln slept here.  Signs mark the spots where he gave speeches or debated Stephen Douglas.  In any of the many town squares throughout the area it is easy to imagine the young lawyer taking a break to rest his horse and read a book.  A visit to historic New Salem shows you how he lived before moving to Springfield.  His speech at Peoria contains precursors of the "House Divided" speech.  Just south of here, in Beardstown, is the only courtroom from Lincoln's time that is still used as an active courtroom to this day.  A new modern presidential library and museum tells his story to the next generation.  Finally, a visit to his tomb in Springfield is a profoundly moving experience.

Lincoln history is alive and well here.

I invite you to join in a reading of the Gettysburg Address this morning at 9:30am Central Standard Time.  The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is webcasting the event.  Take a moment to remember and connect with history.

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.

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 battlefield of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave there lives that this nation might live.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate...we cannot consecrate...we cannot hallow...this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us...that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, 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.