Gettysburg is not a foreign field. It is ours. Brothers, counties, and congregations split. More Americans died in the Civil War than in any war we have sent abroad.
The Union held. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments wrote a new floor into the Constitution. Reconstruction was betrayed; Jim Crow followed; the repair took another century. That is still the story of a country that would rather fight itself than live forever as two nations, one of them built on bondage.
Any honest account of American wars starts here: we have been willing to spend our own blood on our own creed.
