The Battle That Defined A Nation...

Next on the whirlwind of the Gettysburg visit was a quick visit to the Gettysburg Museum of America Civil War...

Images from Gettysburg in the past century...

Civil war armaments...

Memorabilia from the Civil War...

...and heraldry...

Currency from the Confederate States...

A diorama on the decisive battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War...

The American Civil War fought from 1861 to 1865, was the result of a long-standing controversy over slavery, between the southern states, where the economy was driven by slave-dependant agriculture, and the north. The war broke out in April 1861, when the southern states, the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, shortly after President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. 

Among the 34 states that formed the Union in February 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the United States to form the Confederate States of America, or the South. The Confederacy grew to include eleven slave states. 

The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by the United States government, nor was it recognized by any foreign country. The states that remained loyal, including the border states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North.

The Battle of Gettysburg was a military invasion of Pennsylvania by the main Confederate army under General Robert E. Lee in summer 1863. The battle was fought between July 1 - 3 of 1863 and the Union won a decisive victory, with heavy casualties on both sides. 

The victory of the Union forced Lee to retreat to Virginia with his army, marking a turning point in the American Civil War, with Lee increasingly pushed back toward Richmond until his surrender in April 1865. 

Scenes from the battlefield...

After the defeat of the Confederates in the Battle of Gettysburg, the president, Abraham Lincoln, delivered a speech here on November 19, 1863, popularly known as the Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted speech was one of the greatest and most influential statements of national purpose of those days. 

In just over two minutes, Lincoln reiterated the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the Civil War as a struggle for the preservation of the Union sundered by the secession crisis, with "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens. Lincoln also redefined the Civil War as a struggle not just for the Union, but also for the principle of human equality. 

The speech is also inscribed at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington D.C.

Questions on race and principles on human equality, persist not only in the United States but around the world, even today...

Jefferson Davis, an American politician from Kentucky served as the President of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. He had previously served in the Senate and the House of Representatives prior to becoming president of the Confederacy. He was also the Secretary of War, from 1853 to 1857...

The Emancipation Proclamation,  a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863 changed the federal legal status of more than 3 million enslaved people in the designated areas of the South from slave to free... 

Powerful words from an academic turned soldier - Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain...