After the smoke cleared from the bloody and war torn battlefield, the Union army emerged victorious over the Confederate army at the three day battle of Gettysburg. Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States of America, delivered one of the most powerful speeches in American history at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In a sense, the Gettysburg Address redefined the American Civil War in most American’s eyes. Delivered in under three minutes and three hundred words, Lincoln’s speech remains one of the most well known American speeches. This speech would have a lasting effect on future generations of Americans, contrary to Lincoln’s own words. Most importantly though, the Gettysburg Address would change the way that Americans would view the Civil War, liberty, freedom and slavery as a whole. The Background By the end of the battle of Gettysburg, more than 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were missing, wounded, or lying dead in makeshift graves in the …show more content…
Lincoln opened his address by setting the scene of the United State’s birth. He stated that eighty seven years before his speech, America’s father’s would bring forth a new country conceived under liberty with the ideal the every man is equal from birth. The President would go on, and by the end of his speech he would utter the famous words that “the nation 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”. These words would remind Americans that this government was founded by them, made from them, and for them. America would remember their founding and basic principles. It would take time, but eventually most Americans would embrace this concept as the true spirit of humanity. Though they would suffer for many years to come, blacks would be freed in no small part to the effects of the Gettysburg