Gettysburg, 150 Years Ago
July 2, 2013
SPENCER WARREN writes:
One hundred fifty years ago this week, one of the most fateful events in the history of our nation took place.
At Gettysburg, between July 1st and July 3rd, 1863, the Union Army, under the command of General George G. Meade, finally and decisively defeated the invading army led by the heretofore invincible Robert E. Lee. Gettysburg is the greatest battle ever fought in the Western hemisphere, with 51,000 casualties.
Among the notable and crucial feats of gallantry was the stand, on the 2nd, of the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry regiment. Desperately filling a gap in the Union line, its 262 men charged 1,600 advancing rebels, thereby gaining precious time for reinforcements to fill the gap. Only forty-seven survived.
And the famous charge down Little Round Top by the 20th Maine, under the command of Bowdoin Professor Colonel Joshua Chamberlain was also notable. With no ammunition left to fight off the greater number of rebels advancing up the hill, the seizure of which would have turned the Union imperiled left flank, Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge, stopping dead the enemy advance.
The following day, Pickett’s famous mad charge sealed the rebels’ doom. And on the Fourth of July, the Gibraltar of the Mississippi, Vicksburg, surrendered to General Grant after a seven-week siege. This was the climax of a seven-month campaign, the final months of which (incurring quite low Union casualties, Grant the butcher is a myth) have been compared by authorities to the brilliant campaigns of Napoleon.
The conquest of Vicksburg cut the Confederacy in two. The glorious victory at Gettysburg, at such a high cost, frustrated Lee’s hopes of Anglo-French recognition and even of inducing Lincoln, with Washington exposed, to give up the struggle.
On the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary, in 1938, President Roosevelt joined festivities at Gettysburg, which included the last, ancient veterans of the conflict. Barack Obama is junketing in his true spiritual home (if this lying demagogue has one) of Africa. His presence would desecrate this ground, consecrated, as President Lincoln said immortally four months after the battle, “by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here.”
President Lincoln spoke also of our taking “increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion . . . 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.”
Never could Abraham Lincoln have conceived that his black successor and the morally corrupt, lying party he leads (same one as the treason party of 1860) would have no devotion to the nation, or free government, under God, but rather to a Cultural Marxist ideology determined to destroy the nation for which Lincoln, the 1st Minnesota and the 20th Maine, and so many more hundreds of thousands, gave their lives.
—- Comments —-
Terry Morris writes:
I’m no Lincoln basher, but what “new birth of freedom?” And “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has essentially perished from the earth. Also, why in the world would anyone point to “New Deal” Republican FDR as some sort of defender of Americanism as juxtaposed against BHO?
Laura writes:
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people” has led to tyranny.
Anonymous writes:
FDR was a Democrat.