“The American republic was, in 1863, a dangerously isolated democratic flower in a garden full of aristocratic weeds, and if the Civil War succeeded in sundering the United States into two separate pieces, it would be the final confirmation that democracies were unstable and unworkable pipe dreams. ‘The central idea pervading this struggle,’ Lincoln said in 1861, ‘is the necessity…of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,’ for ‘if we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.’ That ‘proving’ was what Gettysburg – and its roll of dead – provided.”
Seven score and ten years ago today, the Battle of Gettysburg began. “[F]rom 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.”
