July 4th is Independence Day. It was also the day Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia evacuated the field at Gettysburg in 1863. Fought over four days in south-central Pennsylvania, the battle decided the fate of the American Civil War; it was Lee’s desperate attempt to secure a politically negotiated peace to the war by striking successfully at the heart of Union territory. Retrospective accounts sometimes depict the North’s victory in the Civil War as the inevitable product of numbers and manufacturing capacity; to do so is to forget the politics of 1863, after years of humiliating Confederate victories against the Union in the east had sapped the will to fight in many quarters (some of which were only dubiously anti-slavery to begin with). If the Army of the Potomac had faltered, so too might have our American future with it.
The victory at Gettysburg secured both the union and the cause of liberty. Four months after the battle, in November, President Abraham Lincoln returned to the battlefield to deliver this address on what happened during those bloody days, and what it meant for the nation:
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 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.
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.
It is the most inspiringly perfect American political rhetoric ever written. Matched to the majesty of the event, brief where others rambled, incisively poetic where we mere mortals fumble amateurishly at the wheel crafting our clay metaphors. The Gettysburg Address — composed in snatches on the backs of envelopes in train cars and in stolen moments by a man holding America together by the seams, seemingly through the grace of God alone — took 272 words to write. This commentary took 273.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone.