Independence Day

Happy 4th of July to everyone!

To mark the occasion, I figured I'd reach back in time to one of the most important dates in the history of the United States.

Date: July 4, 1863

Events: Union wins at Vicksburg and Gettysburg

Stars: General Meade (Gettysburg), General Grant (Vicksburg), Abraham Lincoln.

Things had been going poorly for the Union (USA) in the US Civil War. But on July 4, 1863, Union forces effectively kicked the Confederate forces out of the US at Gettysburg, split the Confederacy in half (Vicksburg) by taking control of the Mississippi River, and took a major morale boost from the two huge victories.

On November 19, 1863 a national cemetery was dedicated at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. At this dedication, President Abraham Lincoln -- probably our greatest President -- gave his famous 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 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.


Lincoln spoke of one of the two great battles that ended on the same day -- results that, when taken together, may have saved the Union. Who knows what the USA, or the world, would have been like if not for the results of that great day 144 years ago?