Politics & Government

Voigts Upstages Robinson in Honoring Lincoln's Address

City leaders didn't discuss their plans with each other on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address; Dwight Robinson never got a chance to recite the speech he learned.


By Martin Henderson

Lake Forest citizens were about to witness a special treat at the City Council meeting on Tuesday. Dwight Robinson, on the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, was going to recite the epic speech during the invocation period. 

However, despite being the very first thing on the agenda, Robinson's best intentions were upstaged when Mayor Scott Voigts dropped the gavel and went away from the agenda by providing his own tribute to Lincoln's speech. 

Voigts talked about its historic nature and then read it, though Voigts' oratory doesn't follow word for word with the generally accepted version of the speech that appears at the Lincoln Memorial (the official text is below).

When he was done, Voigts turned to Robinson for the invocation. Robinson was gracious after having his work to learn the speech go for naught in a room full of people.

"You stole my thunder because I was planning on doing the exact same thing," Robinson, seated to Voigts' right, said through a chuckle. "Clearly we hadn't talked about it."
 
Too bad. The council has been responsible for plenty of theatrics over the past 11 months, but this is one time it would have been a welcome addition.  

The Gettysburg Address was delivered Nov. 19, 1863, about 4 1/2 months after the Battle of Gettysburg, Pa., July 1-3, following the reburial of Union soldiers at the newly created Soldiers National Cemetery.

Here's the text of Lincoln's speech:

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 battlefield 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.

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