On this date, Nov 19th, Lincoln spoke his Gettysburg Address

Gettysburg was our nation's bloodiest battle of the Civil War, a war in which our country was at its most torn, in which even some families fought one another on opposite sides.

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.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm

But while Gettysburg is probably his more famous address, there is one that he thought was better and it contains a directive that I believe we all must keep close to heart.
Lincoln's Greatest Speech
Frederick Douglass called it "a sacred effort," and Lincoln himself thought that his Second Inaugural, which offered a theodicy of the Civil War, was better than the Gettysburg Address
Garry Wills | September 1999 Issue

The Gettysburg Address called people to be dedicated to "the great task remaining before us." The last sentence of the Second Inaugural supplied the moral music, as it were, with which the nation must "finish the work we are in."

With malice toward none;
with charity for all;
with firmness in the right,
as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on
to finish the work we are in;
to bind up the nation's wounds;
to care for him who shall have borne the battle,
and for his widow,
and his orphan —
to do all which may achieve and cherish
a just, and a lasting peace,
among ourselves,
and with all nations.

www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/li...second-inaugural.htm