150 Years Ago Today
The Core Belief
Today we mark the 150th anniversary of the Confederate States of America firing on the Union held Fort Sumter in Charleston, harbor thus beginning the Civil War. An estimated 500,000 Americans lost their lives fighting in the conflict. (The September 17, 1862 Battle of Antietam remains the single bloodiest day in our history: 23,000 men were either killed or wounded on the Sharpsburg, Maryland battlefield.)
So as we remember the reasons we fought that long four-year war, I thought a speech from President Lincoln would be the best way to remember those brave men who fought and died for both the Blue and the Grey.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon 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 here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it 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 can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which 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 this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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