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The Battle of Gettysburg, fought on July 1?3, 1863, was the battle with the largest number of casualties in the American Civil War and is often considered as the war's turning point. Fought in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the Battle of Gettysburg saw 165,000 Union and Confederate soldiers clash in a three day battle that resulted in more than 51,000 casualties. On the third day of the battle, Confederate soldiers in an attack called Pickett's Charge reached the copse of trees near The Angle (a corner in a low stone wall) on Cemetery Ridge; this represented the farthest point north that Robert E. Lee's forces reached during the Civil War. For this reason the copse of trees is often referred to as the High Water Mark of the Confederacy.
Pickett's Charge was a disaster for the Confederate forces and ended Robert E. Lee's plan to move his forces north to Harrisburg Pennsylvania and on to Washington DC. While the Civil War continued on for two more years, the Battle of Gettysburg changed the dynamics of the war and General Lee was never truly on the offensive again.
The tremendous number of dead and wounded sent ripples across the United States; Americans on both sides of the battle were stunned at the violence that came from the Battle of Gettysburg. The people of Gettysburg and around Pennsylvania had to deal with the terrible realities of so many dead. At first, bodies were buried in mass graves. Shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg, however, with the support of Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin, the site was purchased and Union dead were moved from the shallow burial sites on the battlefield to the cemetery. It was originally called Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg.
The removal of Confederate dead from the field burial plots was not undertaken until seven years after the battle. From 1870 to 1873, upon the initiative of the Ladies Memorial Associations of Richmond, Raleigh, Savannah, and Charleston, 3,320 bodies were dug up and sent to cemeteries in those cities for reburial, 2,935 being interred in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond. Seventy-three bodies were reburied in home cemeteries.
The cemetery was dedicated on November 19, 1863. The main speaker at the ceremony was Edward Everett, but it was here that Abraham Lincoln delivered his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address. The night before, Lincoln slept in Wills's house on the main square in Gettysburg, which is now a landmark administered by the National Park Service. The cemetery was completed in March 1864 with the last of 3,512 Union dead were reburied. It became a National Cemetery on May 1, 1872, when control was transferred to the War Department. It is currently administered by the National Park Service as part of Gettysburg National Military Park and contains the remains of over 6,000 individuals who served in a number of American wars, from the Mexican-American War to the present day. 3,512 Union soldiers were buried in the cemetery; of these, 979 are unknown.
When visiting the Gettysburg National Cemetery, you would do well to remember the words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to fully appreciate how important and special this ground truly is:
"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 battle-field 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."
