The Gettysburg Address is 150 years old today.

In ten sentences, Abraham Lincoln did what no American politician, living or dead, is capable of accomplishing. He gave a speech that mattered.

In roughly 270 words (depending on the manuscript you use), Lincoln shared exactly how Americans felt at a time when the Civil War raged 150-years ago.

The featured orator that day at the Consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg was a Mr. Edward Everett, who proceeded to give a 13,607 word speech. Lincoln was a secondary speaker.

If you're an American, you don't remember Everett or his speech. You do remember Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

150-years later, here's Lincoln's speech in its entirety.

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

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who 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 dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these 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 perish from the earth.