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On Visiting Civil War Battlefields
BLUFOn Gettysburg [NR] Abraham Lincoln knew this, and he marked that place mere months after the battle with his famous address. "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." We know from contemporaneous accounts that, as he concluded, Lincoln emphasized his words in a way that those who read them aloud today often neglect: "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." We visit the grounds of Gettysburg, and of the war, to sustain our memory of why those battles took place and still matter today ‐ in defense of the Union and its republican constitutional democracy, the form of government that best respects the natural equality and rights of all people. It is grim, perhaps, to tread the steps where both armies marched, to revisit a time when our nation was at war with itself. It is grimmer still to cherish these places where Americans killed one another, to preserve them with care, to mark them with stones and placards and statues for the men we lost. But it is good for us to remember what they did, and why they did it. Posted by: Besoeker 2019-08-25 |
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