USA HISTORY

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR(1861 1865)

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

[SOURCES]
What “great task” still remained for the living, according to Lincoln’s speech?

(A) to find more ammunition for the war

(B) to fight in a great civil war

(C) to fight in a great civil war

(D) ** to have a “new birth of freedom, “ and United States would not “perish from the earth.”

EXPLANATIONS BELOW

Concept note-1: -In 1863, the task was to save the Union from a bloody and seemingly unending war. In 272 words, Lincoln gave purpose and meaning to the strife; he offered solace to a suffering nation and laid out a powerful vision of a future United States which could emerge from the conflict under a new birth of freedom.

Concept note-2: -The “unfinished work” to which Lincoln refers, “the great task remaining before us, ” is to put into practice the proposition to which this nation was and is dedicated: that all men are created equal. Miraculous though it was, the Constitution had left that work unfinished.

Concept note-3: -Lincoln described the Civil War as a struggle for “a new birth of freedom"–his vision for a nation that provides equality for all of its citizens, creates a unified nation no longer dominated by states’ rights, and defines democracy in terms of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Concept note-4: -In it, he invoked the principles of human equality contained in the Declaration of Independence and connected the sacrifices of the Civil War with the desire for “a new birth of freedom, ” as well as the all-important preservation of the Union created in 1776 and its ideal of self-government.