Answer:
(i) First, it is important to remember the context. America was in the midst of a bloody civil war. Union troops had only recently defeated Confederate troops at the Battle of Gettysburg. It was a the turning point in the war. The stated purpose of Lincoln’s speech was to dedicate a plot of land that would become Soldier’s National Cemetery. However, Lincoln realized that he also had to inspire the people to continue the fight.
Below is the text of the Gettysburg Address, interspersed with my thoughts on what made it so memorable.
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.
“Four score and seven” is much more poetic, much more elegant, much more noble than “Eighty-seven”. The United States had won its freedom from Britain 87 years earlier, embarking on the “Great Experiment”.
(ii) The Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment brought about by the Civil War were important milestones in the long process of ending legal slavery in the United States. This essay describes the development of those documents through various drafts by Lincoln and others and shows both the evolution of Abraham Lincoln’s thinking and his efforts to operate within the constitutional boundaries of the presidency.
Lincoln reasoned out that there were insurgent agents who were intent on destroying the Union without war but there were parties who would rather wage war and have an easy triumph.
Here is his reason:
"While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving<span> the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to </span>destroy<span> it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would </span>make<span> war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would </span>accept<span> war rather than let it perish, and the war came." - President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address March 4, 1865.</span>
C. He gives in and decides he will not go on
