Gettysburg

A forecast day set the mood as we walked into the museum, raindrops sliding down the windows and squeaky boots crossing the laminated floor.  We entered the theater, climbing down the steep steps to find a seat before the show started.  As the lights dimmed, solemn music filled the room and the deep voice of Morgan Freeman took precedence as he started a string of quotes leading into the history of our nation.

"A nation divided against itself cannot stand." 1

As many before us have shared we felt that same somber air as we spent our day in Gettysburg.



The museum was truly the best I've seen.  Large wall to wall images. Short videos to briefly learn about various facts, like war tactics or what slavery was like, in every other room. Articles and objects from the battlefield and era behind clear glass. The museum as a whole acting as a timeline from the beginning of the Civil War to the end.  I highly recommend taking a day to go not only to Gettysburg, but to this museum.

"I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.. 

It will become all one thing or all the other." 2

We drove to stop 1, inserting our audio tour guide and gathering our surroundings.  As the narrator and dramatic noises of warfare filled our ears, our eyes and imagination soaked in the wheat fields, the barn with a cannonball sized hole, Little Round Top, Big Round Top, the peach orchard, Devil's Den, and finally the cemetery.

"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." 3

 

I walked away from the well preserved battlefield, eyes opened by the horror and cost of freedom for this nation, the United States of America, to truly become the land of the free and home of the brave.


The Gettysburg Museum

1 Mark 3:25, Lincoln quoted in his House Divided Speech in June 1858.
2 Lincoln, House Divided Speech
3 Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, November 1863