Gettysburg is the biggest battle in terms of overall in the war. It's got the highest umberof casualties, including eight thousand dead and massive numbers injured. And so there are coffins coming back. There are people being buried. So that erodes public supports for war just like it did inget an army in the 19 seventies. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. Tmaseo er, he argues about the death of union socs, it is an awful alternativ and it shouldn't have been in vain,. But i, hey, came to dedicate the cemetery.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, ten sentences long, delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg after the Union forces had won an important battle with the Confederates. Opening with " Four score and seven years ago," it became one of the most influential statements of national purpose, asserting that America was "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" and "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." Among those inspired were Martin Luther King Jr whose "I have a dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial 100 years later, echoed Lincoln's opening words.
With
Catherine Clinton
Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas and International Professor at Queen's University, Belfast
Susan-Mary Grant
Professor of American History at Newcastle University
And
Tim Lockley
Professor of American History at the University of Warwick
Producer: Simon Tillotson.