While America has many great speeches and other fine documents contained within its history, none are of more significance than our Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. These two documents stand for everything that makes America great; they represent two gigantic bookends that contain between them everything that is the essence and the brilliance of the American experience.
The Declaration of Independence declares that are we endowed by our Creator, not by our government, not by our king, not by our dictator, nor by any other power or principality but that our unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are freely given to us by our Creator, and further that because all men are created equal that each of us, all of us, every man, woman, and child within this country are entitled to exercise these rights. When those words were written down and signed back in the year 1776, these were truly revolutionary words, words almost unheard of or thought of in the annals of human history, to which for most governments, for most principalities, mankind was considered to be in perpetual subjection to the government at large, with rights circumscribed by government decree, and liberty at the sole discretion of the government that they were subject to. This Declaration turn the viewpoint of legitimate government of the people on its head, declaring instead that legitimate and just government powers was in existence only when it was derived from the consent of the governed, as opposed to the arbitrary dictates of those that claimed the "divine right of kings" or other similar but misguided excuses to take from the people what was their birthright.
The War Between the States was a great war, testing whether indeed this was a nation of liberty, as well as to whether it was true that all men are created equal, and therefore entitled to equal rights under the rule of law. Our civil war, took our Declaration of Independence, and tested this eminent document as to whether the words that were written upon it were words that we would live and abide by, or merely words that rung hollow when placed upon the mantle of truth and justice. At the time of the Gettysburg Address, America was at the crossroads of whether it would become that new birthplace of freedom, and whether too it would honor its brave men that had died in this fateful struggle, by becoming dedicated to finishing this heretofore unfinished work of our Declaration, and thereby to re-birth our nation into one that was devoted to being a nation of the people, for the people, and by the people, under the blessings of our God.
The Declaration of Independence was the promised made to the people of what this country could and should become, whereas the Gettysburg Address was that promise writ large, understanding that no government and therefore that no people, is easily conceived, or birth, without the pangs and travail of a difficult passage, but for those dedicated to the completion of such a sacred mission, that this nation, would, under God, become a people united in that proposition that all are conceived in liberty, and that all are indeed children of the one same loving God.