President Barack Obama speaks at the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
President Barack Obama posted a handwritten essay on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on the White House website Tuesday for the 150th anniversary of the speech. An excerpt:
“I linger on these few words that have helped define our American experiment: ‘a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’
Through the lines of weariness etched in his face, we know Lincoln grasped, perhaps more than anyone, the burdens required to give these words meaning. He knew that even a self-evident truth was not self-executing; that blood drawn by the lash was an affront to our ideals; that blood drawn by the sword was painful service to those same ideals.”
Read the whole essay here.