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 are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who have given their lives that that nation might
live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a large sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hollow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract.
Frenzel,12
The world will very 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 that they have thus far so nobly carried on. 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, 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
(Foote 253)
Fifty thousand people died in that hot July, near the town of Gettysburg. The Confederacy had many chances to end the battle, to defeat the Union and become “free and independent states”, and to save many of thousands of lives. But that never happened. Due to careless leadership and planning, those men did die and the Confederacy did lose the battle and eventual the war. If the battle of Gettysburg had been won by the Confederacy, we could be living in large plantation houses surrounded by servants and slaves with Jimmy Carter as our president.
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