I re-read this today.  I was amazed at how appropriate much of it is to today.  I can almost see George W. Bush speaking these same words (with only minor changes) at the site of the World Trade Center.
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Gettysburg Address

"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 their lives that that 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."

Abraham Lincoln
16th President of the United States (1861 – 1865)
1st Republican President

I always get chills when I read this...

- CD

Read carefully these sentences and understand what Lincoln meant:

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us [subjugation of the South in a war that had no legal basis in the Constitution] --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 [Union soldiers] shall not have died in vain [oppressing the South in an illegal war], that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom [except for the South, which was to be 'reconstructed'], and that government of the people, by the people, for the people [the trend is changing to be the people serving the government] shall not perish from the earth."

When the Federal Government chose to shred the Constitution in order to "preserve the Union," it set the wheels in motion for all kinds of unintended consequences..

Funny thing - the Republicans were the liberals of the 1800s.

An afterthought - in consideration of the context of his speech with respect to an external enemy, those words are quite appropriate.

That was the context I was viewing it as well.