We acknowledge today the 150th anniversary of the day the Battle of Gettysburg began in the US Civil War. The surprise victory for the Union Army under General George Gordon Meade and the devastating casualties for both sides may not have turned the war but did, in many ways, complete America’s vision of a democracy where government was derived from the people who were being governed.
Professor Allen C Guelzo of Gettysburg College is a noted historian on the subject, and his piece today in the New York Times is worth passing on. The link is here. He concludes:
By allowing the Confederates to escape after Gettysburg, Meade had unwittingly guaranteed that Lee would live to fight not just another day, but for almost another two years. But even if Gettysburg was not exactly the “turning point” of the war, it still marked the last time that Lee was able to seize the strategic momentum. And it marked something even more important in Lincoln’s mind. The American republic was, in 1863, a dangerously isolated democratic flower in a garden full of aristocratic weeds, and if the Civil War succeeded in sundering the United States into two separate pieces, it would be the final confirmation that democracies were unstable and unworkable pipe dreams. “The central idea pervading this struggle,” Lincoln said in 1861, “is the necessity … of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,” for “if we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
All Lincoln needed, perhaps, to know democracy wasn’t just a pipe dream, was the roll of the dead at Gettysburg, the people who gave their last “measure of devotion” to the cause of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
