Not Long Remembered? Au Contraire, Mister Lincoln

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Echoing Lincoln, keynote speaker and Civil War historian James McPherson said the president took the dais in November 1863 at a time when it looked like the nation “might indeed perish from the earth.”

“The Battle of Gettysburg became the hinge of fate on which turned the destiny of that nation and its new birth of freedom,” McPherson.

In the July 1863 battle, considered the turning point of the war, federal forces turned back a Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s speech was delivered more than four months later, at the dedication of a national cemetery to bury the battle’s casualties.

“Lincoln would have been surprised by the reverence accorded to him by future generations,” McPherson said, noting Lincoln himself held in high regard the country’s founders.

He said the Gettysburg Address, despite its brevity, managed to weave together themes of past, present and future; continent, nation and battlefield; and birth, death and rebirth.

“Men died that the nation might live,” McPherson said. “Yet the old nation also died,” and with it, a system of bondage that enslaved some 4 million Americans.