Gettysburg - 150 Years Later
This July 4 th , Independence Day, celebrates America’s 237 th birthday. It also marks an equally momentous event in our nation’s history…the 150 th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg fought July 1-3, 1863. The sleepy town of 7,800 people located in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania is being inundated with hundreds of thousands of Civil War aficionados who will re-enact several of the battles capped with a guided walk across the field where the failed Pickett’s Charge sounded what is widely believed to have been the death knell at Southern efforts at cessation. It was the bloodiest battle in American history with upward of 51,000 casualties, north and south, consecrating the most sacred of American ground. This in turn gave rise to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which many view as the third most important statement of American principles after the Declaration and Constitution… this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the