The Meaning of the Gettysburg Address

[Claudine]

In the Gettysburg address Lincoln states that a nation only can long endure when the flaw of inequality and sectionalism will be erased.

And did the Black population and free slaves ever really get that equality, north or south? I think that's a moot point. They might have been freed technically, but were they ever embraced fully and integrated into the society that freed them?

Of course, the realization after the war was another story. Equality remains fragile, which every democratic society has to accomplish or defend. In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln didn't give a political program, he simply reminded his fellow citizens on the ideological principles the United States were established on. Those principles are expressed as promises to the people.