Tomorrow is Independence Day. It was 163 years ago today however, when a monumental event may have prevented the United States from being split into two, separate countries. It came with a horrific toll:
The battlefield was not a testament to heroism. It was an ugly health hazard - a field of corpses that deeply concerned Pennsylvania's governor.
Nor was that corpse-strewn field a monument to greatness. The North's general, Meade, had so bungled
the battle, leaving Lee to regroup, that he submitted his resignation to
President Lincoln. But Meade's opponent,
Lee, had done no better, marching blindly into slaughter - a blunder so great
that he submitted his resignation, too.
The battlefield was Gettysburg...
Harry Beckwith
Of all the Americans who have died in all the wars our country has ever fought, almost half - 620,000 - died in the Civil War. Of all the Civil War battles, the one battle with the highest number of casualties was Gettysburg – 51,000 Americans.
Today, we should remember war is not some distant video game of drones. James McPherson helps us remember the words of Lincoln’s greatest general that still resonates:
Like Lincoln, he believed in a hard war and a soft peace.
War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.
Ulysses S. Grant
I believe every American should visit the Gettysburg National Military Park and pay tribute to those courageous Americans that preserved our union in the face of immeasurable cruelty.
In one of history’s most succinct and famous speeches Abraham Lincoln spoke to unite all Americans:
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.
July 4th and July 3rd, are days for us to remember; to honor; and to rededicate ourselves to a united, United States of America.
May God bless you; and may God bless America!
GAP
When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.
