The Battle of Gettysburg: A Victory in the Great Battle Against Slavery

In his famous Gettysburg Address, delivered at the dedication of a cemetery for the fallen Union soldiers of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln eloquently said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

We must not forget. The men who fought and died at Gettysburg—a battle that ended on this day, July 3, in 1863—saved the Union and helped guarantee the end of slavery, and to them we owe an eternal debt of gratitude. But while a detailed examination of the battle itself is a very valuable study, I wish to focus more on the larger significance and backdrop of this historic Civil War battle…

One of the Democrat ways of rewriting history was to talk only about the brilliance and successes of their Confederate generals. While Union Gen. Meade was not a very good general (it was not until U.S. Grant took charge of the Union armies that there was a general as great as and greater than the talented Confederate leaders), he had officers who fought very heroically and well at Gettysburg, with the repulse of Pickett’s (failed) Charge illustrating that clearly.

It is key to note that this victory came at a time when even those who had denied the charge at first understood that the war was about slavery. The immortal Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves in Confederate states was issued Jan. 1, 1863. “Everyone seemed to feel a new sort of exhilarating life,” said John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary, after Lincoln issued the Proclamation. “The President’s proclamation had freed them as well as the slaves.”

Just before that, in Dec. 1862, Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued a proclamation of his own, first introducing the official Confederate policy of treating white officers of black Union troops and their black soldiers as slaves or criminals instead of Prisoners-of-war (POWs). This was followed in May 1863 by The Retaliatory Act of the Confederate Congress, which said it aimed to protect the “institution of African slavery.”…

Gettysburg was fought in the midst of this ideological battle over slavery. Indeed, the Confederate army had just devastated the black communities in parts of Pennsylvania leading up to the battle. Gettysburg, which had had a thriving free black community, was decimated. The white citizens of Greencastle, PA, rose up and saved a number of the Confederates’ black captives, but an unknown number of others were enslaved and many disappeared from history, never to be traced again. That is the hideous backdrop of the bloody Battle of Gettysburg.

So, when the Union soldiers won their victory and damaged the Confederate forces of Gen. Robert E. Lee, they won a victory not just for the Union army but for justice and against slavery. The very Confederates who had run rampant rounding up defenseless black women and children in Pennsylvania came to Gettysburg and lost, badly…

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