Gettysburg was fought 1-3 July 1863,
The Confederates under General Robert E Lee,
The Unionists led by George Gordon Meade.

After success in Virginia, Lee began this new campaign,
And drove at the Unionists again and again,
The number killed or wounded was frankly profane.

The total casualties were 57,225,
Only a third of Lee’s officers remained free or alive,
Ginnie Wade the only civilian that didn’t thrive.

This battle’s considered the turning point of the war,
Meade’s Potomac Army knew what it was fighting for,
It decided the future of slavery, that it should be no more,

Out of this battle came the Ghettysburg Address,
A speech seen as America’s finest by both soldiers and press,
In which the principles of human equality are clearly expressed.

“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.”