[Illustration: 

    FACSIMILE OF GETTYSBURG ADDRESS.

    Address delivered at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg.

    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 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 their nation might live.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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

    November 19, 1863]

There was disappointment that Meade had not shown more energy after Gettysburg in the pursuit of Lee’s army and that some attempt, at least, had not been made to interfere with the retreat across the Potomac.  Military critics have in fact pointed out that Meade had laid himself open to criticism in the management of the battle itself.  At the time of the repulse of Pickett’s charge, Meade had available at the left and in rear of his centre the sixth corps which had hardly been engaged on the previous two days, and which included some of the best fighting material in the army.  It has been pointed out more than once that if that corps had been thrown in at once with a countercharge upon the heels of the retreating divisions of Longstreet, Lee’s right must have been curled up and overwhelmed.  If this had happened, Lee’s army would have been so seriously shattered that its power for future service would have been inconsiderable.  Meade was accepted as a good working general but the occasion demanded something more forcible in the way of leadership and, early in 1864, Lincoln sends for the man who by his success in the West had won the hopeful confidence of the President and the people.