**Previously recorded by Phyllis Schlafly // July 2013 **
This week, our nation commemorates a major moment in our history. From the 1st through the 3rd of July, 1863, the fields surrounding Gettysburg, Pennsylvania witnessed the largest and bloodiest battle in American history. Union General George Meade’s 85,000 troops clashed with the 75,000 confederate soldiers commanded by General Robert E. Lee. Those three insufferable days resulted in more than 50,000 Americans dead, wounded, or missing in battle.
Today you’ll find some 1,400 monuments, markers, or tablets commemorating the battle and the men who fought there. The fields of Gettysburg are rich with solemn meaning, not only for the lives lost, but for the turning point this battle represented in the great and costly American Civil War.
Months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln traveled to Pennsylvania for the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. The principal speaker that day, former senator Edward Everett, was a noted orator who delivered a detailed two-hour address, recounting the heroism of battle. By contrast, Lincoln delivered his 271 word remarks in just two minutes. Now, his Gettysburg Address is among our most cherished and notable historical documents.
Lincoln said that the great Civil War was testing whether our nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” … “can long endure.” He then called on all of us to “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.”
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address bears a great lesson for us today. As we face constitutional and even existential crises, will we dedicate ourselves to the great task of ensuring constitutional self-government? Will we vigilantly defend the liberty in which we were conceived? Let us be, in Lincoln’s words, “highly resolved” to preserve this nation under God, and not let it perish from the earth.
This post originally appeared at https://phyllisschlafly.com/constitution/lessons-from-gettysburg/
Ryan Hite