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Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Nancy F. Koehn for the Washington Post. To read the complete article, check out other resources, obtain subscription information, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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All roads to our America lead through Gettysburg. 150 years ago, President Lincoln arrived there around dusk and set foot on the sacred soil that, just four months earlier, had run with blood of the Civil War. Then the next morning, November 19, 1863, he stood under a clear sky—on earth since transformed from a battlefield to a burial ground—and delivered a deceptively simple speech atop Cemetery Hill that, in just a few short minutes, changed American history forever.

To this day, the Gettysburg Address continues to shape who we are as a people and as a nation. Without it, we don’t have Martin Luther King, Jr. standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 100 years later saying, “I Have a Dream.” We don’t have John and Robert Kennedy taking the first tentative steps toward civil rights legislation. We don’t have, nearly 50 years after that, the election of our nation’s first black president.

Without the Gettysburg Address, we don’t have the promise of America brought to complicated, often difficult life.

In the battle itself, more than 50,000 men on both sides had been killed, captured or wounded in a three-day struggle that ended with the Confederate army retreating south across the Potomac. It was a Union victory, in a way, but Lincoln was furious and disappointed that Federal troops hadn’t pursued the defeated Confederates as they marched back, crushed the rebel army and ended the war.

In the ensuing months, as the fighting dragged on, Lincoln tried to make sense of the magnitude and duration of the conflict and of its enormous, mounting losses. What was the essence of the nation for which so many Americans, black as well as white, had sacrificed so much? How did the ultimate meaning of America explain, perhaps even redeem, the war itself and why it must continue to be waged?

It was out of his unshakeable responsibility, his empathy, his melancholy, his exasperation, his ability to divine the right and his commitment to preserve the Union that the substance of what would become the Gettysburg Address was born.

With his speech, he provided a template for what we have since come to define as the heart of great American leadership. Lincoln shared his vision for the country’s future, helping its citizens look beyond the horrors toward greater good—and beyond the nation’s imperfections and dangers, toward progress and redemption.

Lincoln left Gettysburg the evening of November 19th satisfied he had delivered his intended messages: a rebirth of founding ideals and a plea for his fellow Americans to change their own hearts. He explained how the conflict would serve as a reconstruction of the “nation,” a word he used five times in that short address. In late 1863, however, no one believed that the president’s remarks comprised a speech for the ages.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Nancy F. Koehn is an historian at the Harvard Business School where she holds the James E. Robison chair of Business Administration. Koehn’s research focuses on entrepreneurial leadership and how leaders, past and present, craft lives of purpose, worth, and impact. She is currently working on a book about the most important lessons from six leaders’ journeys, including Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton and Rachel Carson. Her most recent book, The Story of American Business: From the Pages of the New York Times (Harvard Business Press, 2009), examines the people, events, and larger forces that have shaped business in the twenty-first century.