The meaning of the Battle of Gettysburg

It must have been an awfully sad July 4^th in 1863; the Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1-3, ended today 150 years ago.  It was a decisive battle, a turning point of the Civil War, although still more people died after than before the Gettysburg Battle.  Drew Gilpin Faust’s (current Harvard University president) “This Republic of Suffering” talks about the death in the Civil War.

One may say it is ironic or even a curse that a battle with great casualty during the Civil War had to fight and end just before the birthday of the nation.  But it may have special meaning if one thinks along this line that America was re-born a better nation after the Civil War as Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, “that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, . . .” Carry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg has a subtitle, “The words that remade [thus another birthday] America”.