In Remembrance of...

Gettysburg

"The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), fought in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennslyvania, as part of the Gettysburg Campaign, was the battle with the largest number of casualties in the American Civil War and is often described as the war's turning point.
Union Major General George Gordon Meade's
Army of the Potomac defeated attacks
by Confederate General Robert E.
Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, ending
Lee's invasion of the North"

"We entered Gettysburg in the afternoon,
just in time to meet the enemy entering the town,
and in good season to drive him back
before his getting a foothold."
~John Buford

"In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls.”
~Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain


"My dead and wounded were nearly as great in number as those still on duty."
-Colonel William C. Oates

Let us remember with reverence today the thousands
of men who so bravely defended this Our Country.
May we also give thanks for what they sacrificed as well as remember
President Abraham Lincoln's profound words....

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."
-President
Abraham Lincoln


"Although no sculptured marble should rise to their memory,
nor engraved stone bear record of their deeds,
yet will their remembrance be as lasting as the land they honored."
~Daniel Webster

Please join me in giving thanks and
remembering that memorable day at Gettysburg
long ago... as we reflect on what freedom
and joy it yielded to all of us
by helping to secure our unity as one Nation Under God!

"Where there is no vision, the people perish:
but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."
-Proverbs 29:18

paintings by~
Fletcher C Ransom, & Harper's Weekly
Gettysburg battle description- Wikipedia