America's Greatest Memorial

Today, America's Memorial Day tends to be more beach-and-barbecue than reflection-and-remembrance. But the day still exists to commemorate the sacrifice of the more than 1.1 million American service members who have died in battle--and to remember why they gave up their lives.

No one has ever done that better than Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address. Even before Americans began decorating Civil War graves to give Memorial Day its start, Lincoln's short speech pointed the way to the greatest memorial of all.

Getting to Gettysburg

Fought July 1-3, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg was one of the bloodiest in American history. It was also one of the most decisive battles of the Civil War, though Gettysburg itself was hardly a strategic site. In fact, the location of the famous battle was something of an accident.

In late spring 1863, General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, confronted a dilemma. Having repelled the Federal Army of the Potomac at the Battle of Chancellorsville (protecting the Confederate capital at Richmond), Lee realized that he could either prepare for yet another Union assault or take the fight to the North. He opted to attack--at least partly, it seems, because his army was short on supplies that were easier stolen than grown or sewn, including food, clothing, and shoes.

Two Armies Converge

Advancing northward, Lee's army met little resistance until it reached the small farming town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In late June, a Confederate brigade passed through Gettysburg, and its commander noted that the town contained a shoe factory. Since the troops needed shoes, a brigade was dispatched on June 30 to procure footwear from the factory. Yet the brigade turned back upon observing Federal soldiers headed toward the town.

Determined to have the shoes, and not realizing the considerable size of the Federal force, Major General Henry Heth received permission to use his division to take Gettysburg. Before long, tens of thousands of men on both sides were in the fight. After three days of attack and counterattack--culminating in "Pickett's Charge," in which more than 12,000 Confederate troops stormed the Federal lines and were gruesomely repelled--the Union army prevailed. Lee retreated back to Virginia, and never mounted another serious offensive.

Lincoln's Few But Forceful Words

Four months after the battle, on November 19, 1863, President Lincoln visited Gettysburg to help dedicate a new national cemetery. The president was not the event's main speaker. That honor belonged to Edward Everett, a Massachusetts statesman and perhaps the best-known orator of the time. As was customary, Everett delivered a lengthy oration, speaking for two hours straight. Lincoln spoke for just two minutes. He said:

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 this 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.

The day after the ceremony, Edward Everett wrote to Lincoln, "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today, the central idea of the occasion remains the same. As Lincoln points out, we honor the sacrifice of soldiers for freedom and self-government best by carrying forward the work of democracy. We dedicate memorials by dedicating ourselves.