Hint: It's not a pop song and it happened 156 years ago today.
On July 1, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg began.
On July 1, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg began.
Over the course of the next three days, the Union
Army of the Potomac, led by Major General George C. Meade, rebuffed the final
attempt by Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to invade the
North. The battle culminated with
Pickett's charge, an infantry assault by the Confederate forces, into the
center of the Union line at Cemetery Ridge that was repulsed and resulted in
12,500 Confederate deaths. The total casualties on both sides have been
estimated at 50,000. Lee was forced to retreat and Northern observers reacted
with jubilation. The diarist, George
Templeton Strong wrote of the outcome, "The results of this victory are
priceless. ... The charm of Robert E. Lee's invincibility is broken. The Army
of the Potomac has at last found a general that can handle it, and has stood
nobly up to its terrible work in spite of its long disheartening list of
hard-fought failures. ... Copperheads are palsied and dumb for the moment at
least. ... Government is strengthened four-fold at home and abroad.” That optimism soon dissipated when Meade
failed to pursue the retreating Lee. President
Lincoln's response was, "Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand
and they would not close it". The slaughter continued for nearly two more years. The wounds have taken generations to heal. The scars may always remain.
On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, ten sentences that defined the meaning of the war and unveiled a path toward healing.
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.
On April 12, 1861 at 4:30 a.m. Confederate Soldiers under the command of General Pierre Beuregard opened fire with 50 cannons upon the the Union's Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. At 2: 30 p.m., that afternoon, the garrison surrendered and the Civil War had began.
This link is to the my favorite Civil War site featuring complete editions of Harper's Weekly,
A Journal of Civilization
A Journal of Civilization
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