The cemetery was planned as the final resting place for more than 3,500 Union soldiers who lost their lives at Gettysburg. Over 45,000 were wounded, and more than 10,000 were captured or missing. The Union North and Confederate South lost more than 7,000 men during the three-day battle. The Battle of Gettysburg on July 1-3, 1863, was one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War (1861-1865). It was an important occasion for the Nation to honor those who had given their lives during the Battle of Gettysburg. Image: Noord-Hollands Archief / Fotoburo de Boer, via Wikimedia Commons.The Gettysburg Address was a speech given by President Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863, at the official dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery (now called the Gettysburg National Cemetery) at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. But most of all, King emphasises the collective endeavour that is necessary to bring about the world he wants his children to live in: the togetherness, the linking of hands, which is essential to make the dream a reality. In the last analysis, King’s speech is a rhetorically clever and emotionally powerful call to use non-violent protest to oppose racial injustice, segregation, and discrimination, but also to ensure that all Americans are lifted out of poverty and degradation. Although Lincoln and the American Civil War represented progress in the cause to make all Americans free regardless of their ethnicity, King makes it clear in ‘I Have a Dream’ that there is still some way to go. So, Martin Luther King’s allusion to the words of Lincoln’s historic speech do two things: they call back to Lincoln’s speech but also, by extension, to the founding of the United States almost two centuries before. ‘Four score and seven years’ is eighty-seven years, which takes us back from 1863 to 1776, the year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His speech famously begins with the words: ‘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 equal.’ In that speech, delivered at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery (now known as Gettysburg National Cemetery) in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in November 1863, Lincoln had urged his listeners to continue in the fight for freedom, envisioning the day when all Americans – including Black slaves – would be free. The opening words to his speech, ‘Five score years ago’, allude to a specific speech Lincoln himself had made a century before: the Gettysburg Address. In his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, King was doing more than alluding to Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred years earlier. No sooner has the dream gathered momentum than it becomes a more concrete ‘hope’. What’s more, in moving from ‘dream’ to a different noun, ‘hope’, King suggests that what might be dismissed as an idealistic ambition is actually something that is both possible and achievable. The shift is natural and yet it is a rhetorical masterstroke, since the vision of a better nation which King has set out as a very personal, sincere dream is thus telescoped into a universal and collective struggle for freedom. Nevertheless, in working from ‘I have a dream’ to a different four-word phrase, ‘this is our hope’.
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