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Gettysburg. Fact #1: The battle was fought at Gettysburg because of the area road system—it had nothing to do with shoes . Fact #2: The First Day’s battle was a much larger engagement than is generally portrayed .
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Fact #1: The battle was fought at Gettysburg because of the area road system—it had nothing to do with shoes. Fact #2: The First Day’s battle was a much larger engagement than is generally portrayed. Fact #3: The Second Day’s Battle was the largest and costliest of the three days. Fact #4: Of 120 generals present at Gettysburg, nine were killed or mortally wounded during the battle. Fact #5: More than one-third of all known photographs of dead soldiers on Civil War battlefields were recorded at Gettysburg. Fact #6: Pickett’s Charge was large and grand but by no means the largest charge of the Civil War. Not even close. Fact #7: The Battle of Gettysburg is by far the costliest battle of the Civil War but not necessarily the largest. Fact #8: 63 Medals of Honor awarded to Union soldiers for their actions at Gettysburg Fact #9: The Gettysburg Address essentially said the same thing as the famous orator Edward Everett’s speech but in 1/60th the time. Fact #10: General George Gordon Meade was only in command for three days before the battle.
Map 1: Civil War battles fought in Maryland and Virginia prior to the Battle of Gettysburg. 1. Why did most major land battles in the eastern theater of the Civil War surround the Washington, D.C.--Richmond, Virginia area?
1. Arlington National Cemetery is located on Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s confiscated estate. Days after resigning from the U.S. Army on April 20, 1861, to take command of Virginian forces in the Civil War, Robert E. Lee left the Arlington estate where he had married Mary Lee and lived for 30 years. He would never return. After Virginia seceded from the Union on May 23, 1861, Union troops crossed the Potomac River from the national capital and occupied the 200-acre property and house that been built by George Washington Parke Custis, Mary’s father and the step-grandson of George Washington
After Mary Lee, confined to a wheelchair, sent a representative instead of appearing personally to pay a $92.07 tax bill, the government seized the property in 1864. With Washington, D.C., teeming with dead soldiers and out of burial space, Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs formally proposed Arlington as the location of a new military cemetery. On May 13, 1864, 21-year-old Private William Christman of Pennsylvania, who had died of peritonitis, became the first military man buried at Arlington. To ensure the house would forever be uninhabitable for the Lees, Meigs directed graves to be placed as close to the mansion as possible, and in 1866 he ordered the remains of 2,111 unknown Civil War soldiers killed on battlefields near Washington, D.C., to be placed inside a vault in the Lees’ rose garden. -Smithsonian
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 battle-field 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 that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not 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.
