We may have forgotten, but this historic moment was delivered as a tribute to the fallen on the field of battle as a dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial Cemetery. President Lincoln sought to bring to some comfort to those who were left behind, and remind the survivors that this conflict was a struggle between good people who profoundly, but honestly disagree in the fundamentals of our union..."The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here".....
Mr. President... sadly, we will never forget..... Nor should we
The Gettysburg Address
"Fourscore 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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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."
DPB, Essick's diary excerpt in #9 was riveting. We read of 50,000 men either wounded or killed in the battle of Gettysburg, and most of us probably don't think of countless unburied bodies, the stench, all the horror of the aftermath. Essick's eyewitness account is the sort of thing you don't read in the history books.