Four score and seven years ago...

My tour of America wouldn't be complete without visiting a couple of Civil War battlefields.

Gettysburg

Statue of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg PA. His Gettysburg address is one of the great speeches in history.

Union cannons overlooking the battlefield at Gettysburg.

A view of the Gettysburg battlefield. The Confederate army crossed this field and charged up the hill ("Pickett's charge") but suffered a heavy defeat.

Memorial for the Pennsylvania soldiers. The national cemetery at Gettysburg is filled with memorials and markers for the regiments and brigades from all of the different states.

 

Display of Civil War firearms at the Gettysburg visitor center. There is a great museum and 15 minute movie on the Battle of Gettysburg.

A small section of the Gettysburg cyclorama on display at the visitor center.

Manassas (Bull Run)

A statue of the great Confederate general "Stonewall" Jackson surveying the Manassas battlefield (aka Battle of Bull Run). Here Jackson led the Confederates to a resounding victory over the Union army.



Bull Run. This creek doesn't look like much, but this is where the Union army crossed Bull Run in their drive to capture Manassas railroad junction. I was able to walk roughly the same path as the Union army for the First Battle of Bull Run.



Stone bridge over Bull Run

Battlefield display of where the Union cannons were placed on the battlefield.

 

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.

 

Abraham Lincoln

November19, 1863