noraleah:

whitehouse:

150 years after President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, President Obama penned a handwritten tribute to President Lincoln’s historic remarks.

“Through the lines of weariness etched in his face, we know Lincoln grasped, perhaps more than anyone, the burdens required to give these words meaning.  He knew that even a self-evident truth was not self-executing; that blood drawn by the lash was an affront to our ideals; that blood drawn by the sword was in painful service to those same ideals.”