Throughout the speech, life and death operate as symbols of national survival. In the opening sentence, Lincoln recalls the beginning of the United States’s life as a nation which he personifies as “conceived in liberty” by the founding fathers. He refers to the lives of the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg and addresses the soldiers who continue to fight in the Civil War, as well as the audience listening to the speech, as “the living.” References to life are balanced with images of death, specifically the deaths of the Union soldiers who gave their lives at Gettysburg. The “honored dead” have made possible the continued life of the United States and, with the commitment of the living audience, the hope of a “new birth of freedom.”
Life and Death Quotes in The Gettysburg Address
…our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
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 here 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.
Life and Death Symbol Timeline in The Gettysburg Address
