Revised Gettysburg Address

Abe, the text looks ok to me, but you leave yourself open to criticism unless you really hammer home your empathy, etc. Don't assume they'll recognize you're the Good Guy here. Please consider the following revisions:


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 sadly engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are regrettably met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come, lamentably, to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave, sadly, their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether heartbreakingly fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we sadly can not dedicate -- we sadly can not consecrate -- we sadly can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and (lamentably) dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our regrettably poor power to add or, unfortunately, detract. The world will, sadly, little note, nor, regretfully, long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be mindfully dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who, sadly, 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 and regrettably dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they, sadly, gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly and heartbreakingly resolve that these lamentably 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 sadly perish from the earth.