In honor of July 4th, here is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Stirring, indeed. I mucked around a bit [in brackets].
“Four score and seven years ago our [mothers and] fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all [people] 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 [women and] 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.”
My nonfiction self got wondering if women died in the Battle of Gettysburg, and sure enough, they did, as you no doubt already knew but I did not.
(Hm. Good topic for a history book for kids…)
From “Women at the Battle of Gettysburg”:
http://historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews111.shtml
“…a woman soldier was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg; she was found dead on the west side of the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge.”
And, “Amazingly, only a single civilian actually died in the battle — 20-year-old Mary Virginia Wade…. The most commonly accepted version is that she was baking bread … when a military bullet pierced two doors and struck her in the back.”
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More about women soldiers in the Civil War from the Wash Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/women-soldiers-fought-bled-and-died-in-the-civil-war-then-were-forgotten/2013/04/26/fa722dba-a1a2-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story.html
My husband brought up the same question. I had it on my To Do list to look it up. : ) Thanks!