An anniversary: Four score and seven

eats shoots 'n leaves

Back in 1902, a great-grandfather, Albert Coleman, paid a visit to the scene of a war he’d fought 39 years before. Here he stands, bearded and bemedaled, in the rocks of Devil’s Den, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting in the bloodiest war in the nation’s history.

Gettysburg was also the scene of the best-known speech in American history, delivered four months after the fighting by an embattled President Abraham Lincoln.

In a very few words once memorized by several generations of American middle school students, Lincoln reminded us that eloquence doesn’t require endless words and rhetorical flourishes.

So in honor of iur three great-grandfathers who fought for the Union, where’s the text Lincoln deliver on this day in 1863:

Four score 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…

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