by Tom Stilp JD, MBA/MM, LLM, MSC, DBA, July 10th, 2025
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought just before July 4, 1863, between July 1 and July 3, 1863, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, killing over 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.Gettysburg).
At less than ten (10) sentence long, the Gettysburg Address is an example of one of the finest speeches in the English language (Library of Congress). Lincoln said at Gettysburg: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” As this In the Loop article attests, the opposite is true.
At the time of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 87 years after the Declaration of Independence, thousands were dying on the bloody battlefield, tens of thousands more were wounded or captured, or dying of infectious diseases.
Lincoln was despised, hated and ridiculed not only in the Southern Confederacy, but in the Northern Union as well. “Lincoln’s War” they said. Newspapers were enormously influential and powerfully partisan.
Those opposed to Lincoln relentlessly attacked his administration and his family. While Lincoln and his wife Mary were privately mourning the death of their 11-year-old son William from typhoid fever (believed to be from contaminated water in the White House), Lincoln was trying to get Congress to end slavery.
People usually think of success as a list of accomplishments, but with Lincoln, and perhaps more importantly, it was a list of obstacles, difficulties, defeats and losses to overcome.
Next year, on July 4th we will celebrate the “semiquincentennial” of the oldest democracy in the world (quincentennial meaning 500, and “semi” meaning half that, or 250). 250 years later, the nation “so conceived and so dedicated” has endured. Given our unique system of laws, and despite our flaws and differences, the US has survived and is one of the most prosperous countries in the World.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address#/media/File:Gettysburg_Address_Amalgamated_Text.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) (The US is $31 Trillion, and the second largest economy, China, with 4 x the population, is at $19 Trillion).
https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.24404500/?st=text
This In the Loop edition is based on a former article, “Reflections: 160 Years after the Murder of Abraham Lincoln.”
