President Lincoln delivered the speech at a ceremony dedicating a national cemetery for Civil War soldiers. Crowds of people gathered in a field near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863, to listen to him and other speakers. In July of that year, a Civil War battle that ended with 7,500 soldiers killed had taken place near where Lincoln spoke.

My textbook has the most famous version of the speech—but nobody knows for sure exactly what Lincoln said 150 years ago. There’s obviously no audio recording of him giving the speech! Newspapers at the time reported what listeners heard, but he didn’t write the speech out until later.

Lincoln gave this speech in the middle of the war, dedicating a national cemetery, so it must have been a pretty solemn occasion. He probably wanted his audience to think about why the war was worth fighting. He probably also thought that some of the dead soldiers’ families might be there listening—as well as people who had seen the battle or its aftermath. Did he think about the possibility that future generations would read and think about this speech? As the leader of the Union, he was probably very interested in showing why the United States needed to stay together.