Four score and seven minutes ago I walked out of the Camden-Rockport Middle School after watching Jim Morse’s sixth grade class study the Civil War lesson for the day. The class has been learning about the war for the last eight weeks. The end of the class featured a group of students dressed as Abraham Lincoln reciting the Gettysburg Address.

The Gettysburg Address
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.

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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not 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.

There is no official photo of Lincoln delivering the address. It took him less than two minutes to make the speech, which was 272 words long and delivered to a crowd estimated at 15,000. By the time the photographer was set and ready, Lincoln was already heading back to his seat.

But those two minutes united a nation. In his speech Lincoln is quoted as saying that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” American history now notes that the speech is the most-quoted, most-memorized piece of oratory in the history of the United States.

As the class came to a close the students were asked to complete a formative assessment. I think we used to call them quizes. See how you do?

What were the years of the Civil War?

On what date did the war start?

Name two reasons for the Civil War?

What is the CSA?

Who was president of the north?

Who was president of the south?
 

Answers after the speech.


Answers:

1861 – 1865

4:30 a.m. April 12, 1861

a. Slavery and b. State rights

The Confederate States of America

Abraham Lincoln

Jefferson Davis