Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

We traced this line directly to the closing sentence of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery on November 19, 1863, and confirmed the exact wording in the surviving manuscripts written in Lincoln's own hand—the Nicolay, Hay, Everett, Bancroft, and Bliss copies—with the signed and dated Bliss copy serving as the standard authoritative text. The clause is preserved in the scholarly Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Vol. 7, p. 23) and reproduced in Boritt's collection of Lincoln quotations, both of which cite it to the Gettysburg Address, and our database review returned multiple independent volumes attributing it unambiguously to Lincoln. This quote is among the most thoroughly documented passages in American oratory, with a complete manuscript paper trail and no serious competing claimant to the exact wording. The tricolon combined with the prophetic "shall not perish from the earth" is unique to this speech and firmly established in the primary record. Accordingly, this quotation is verified.