As I have done before, don’t’ forget in the midst of the:
hotdogs, beer, flag flying, baseball playing or watching, ice cream, and apple
pie, to take a few moments to read the master essay of the Committee of Five,
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Sherman, and Robert
Livingston – The Declaration of Independence – wrote such a fine love letter to
King George III.
The third and decisive day in the Battle of
Gettysburg happened 150 years ago today.
It was arguably the turning point against the Confederacy; as not only was General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia repulsed, but Union General
Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee completed the siege and battle of
Vicksburg, Mississippi on the same day, which gave control of the Mississippi river to the Union and effectively ended the war in the west.
Though it wasn’t delivered until November 1863, President
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, considered to be some of the best prose
ever delivered is worth also reading today.
I will spare you having to link to it and let you
read it here:
Gettysburg Address
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 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 her
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.
Abraham Lincoln
Pause and reflect on these documents and please
consider what they mean as a reflection of our country today.
Now go take in one of the local fireworks displays.
