Four Score and Seven Years Ago

Seven score and ten years ago, Abraham Lincoln boarded a train bound for the little hamlet of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Four months earlier Gettysburg had been the unlikely scene of the greatest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere. For three days the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia led by the venerable Robert E. Lee slugged it out with the beleaguered Army of the Potomac under its new and nervous commander, George Gordon Meade.

Fought around landmarks that would be etched into military history, Little Round Top, Culp's Hill, the Wheat Field, the Peach Orchard, the Devil's Den, the battle reached its climax on farmland in a shallow valley between two ridges running north and south called appropriately, it seems, Seminary Ridge, and Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand Confederate troops, battle flags waving in the breeze, bayonets gleaming in the sun, marched in perfect order across the mile wide field until they came into range of the Union canons filled with grapeshot, and hell belched forth slaughtering hundreds and leaving gaping holes in the formation. Still they came until they pierced the Union line. Forever remembered as "Pickett's Charge," it was the "ebb tide" of the Confederacy, and came within a hair's breadth of changing history, before it was driven back. Half of the men that made the charge never made it home. Casualty estimates for the entire battle range from 43-51,000, with over 7,000 dead, 27,000 wounded, and another 10,000 missing, either dead, prisoners or deserters.

It took months to clean up the carnage. Most of the bodies were buried in shallow graves until a new National Cemetery was made ready. Thirty-five hundred Union troops were finally buried in the cemetery as well as 3,200 Confederates. Most of the Confederates, however, were later transferred and reinterred in southern cemeteries.

On November 19, 1863, the National Cemetery was dedicated. One of the great orators of the day, Edward Everett, had been asked to give the keynote speech. He spoke for two hours. Almost as an afterthought, the president was invited to come and say a few words. Legend has it that Lincoln hastily wrote his speech on an envelope while riding on the train, but he had actually written it out beforehand, carefully crafting in a few words the true meaning of the American experience.

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.

Eighty-seven years earlier our fathers had signed the Declaration of Independence. I suspect that with the rewriting of American history in our public school textbooks and the dumbing down of our children with such programs as Common Core, which is not based on moral, Christian, or patriotic values, most Americans probably don't realize that not only was America conceived in Liberty, we were the first nation in the history of the world to ever be founded on the belief that people have a right to be free, and that government exists only by the will of the people, and not the other way around.

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.

Honoring our war dead, those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice that we might live on in peace, should be one of the top priorities of not only our government, but of all Americans. How ungrateful and pathetically small it was that during the recent partial government shutdown the current president thumbed his nose at our heroes coming home in caskets. How pitifully selfish it is now that on this momentous occasion, the 150th anniversary of the most well known speech given in American history, he doesn't have time, even though he was invited months ago, to take a twenty minute helicopter flight to Gettysburg to be a part of the ceremony. Here is an event that is "altogether fitting and proper" to do, but he can't be bothered. This is the man who shamelessly compares himself to Lincoln even though he couldn't stand in Lincoln's footsteps, much less in his shoes. The comparisons stop here.

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.

What else can be said? This paragraph has been dissected, taken apart, scrutinized, and explained by hundreds of writers and commentators, but nobody can say it any better than Lincoln wrote it. What humility in light of those who died, what pathos in honoring their sacrifice, what passion for the cause of freedom, what brilliance in the writing. Who has ever better described a patriot, or more eloquently captured the emotion families and friends suffer when their loved ones give "the last full measure of devotion?" Who has ever better challenged his countrymen "that these dead shall not have died in vain?" Who has ever better understood the Founders's intent in creating a free nation under God "of the people, by the people, for the people?"

This is our America. We are the greatest nation on earth. The question before us is, can we take from our honored dead the increased devotion to have a new birth of constitutional freedom or is this nation going to "perish from the earth?"

We dare not let it.