ANOTHER FOURTH OF JULY

These images are from the aftermath of the great Battle of Gettysburg, fought 1 - 3 July, 1863.

Dead Union soldiers near the Emmittsburg Road portion of the Battlefield.

Fallen Union and Confederate soldiers lay intermingled from the Living Hell that was Devils Den.

Union and Confederate dead lay where they fell at the Little Round Top, where the extreme left of the Union line was held on the first day of the battle.

Thousands of horses shared the same fate as the soldiers of both Armies.

Aftermath of the famous charge of Pickett's CSA Division.

The Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania was the High Tide of the Confederacy and the turning point of the Civil War for Union. In the space of three days in July a total of 17,684 Union soldiers were killed and wounded; 18,750 Confederate soldiers killed and wounded, in a monumental struggle that began as a forage patrol for a shoe factory. The significance of this battle was codified by the words of Abraham Lincoln, who redefined the cause and meaning of America in his great Gettysburg Address:

"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 that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate . . . we can not consecrate . . . we can not 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 reason why the outcome of Gettysburg was so important are contained within these words, carved in stone upon the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. - S.L.