Gettysburg Address Thesis

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The Gettysburg Adress is one of the most famous speeches in history. It was a speech given on November 19, 1863 by the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. The military tribute was dedicated to the Union soldiers who were murdered at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. [https://goo.gl/1wK54L] In the speech, Abraham Lincoln mentions soldiers on the Union side but possibly also on the Confederacy. There were two sides to the Civil War. There were the Northern States, also referred to as the Union, and the Southern States, also mentioned as the Confederacy. The Northern states did not want the Southern states to have slaves, and they wanted slaves to be free. This also included their task of preserving the Union, which was made up of twenty states. The Southern states wanted to keep the slaves that they already owned, and they did not want to be in the Union. In all, according to the textbook, “Creating America. A History of the United States” people who fought in the civil war fought to either preserve slavery or ban slavery. The textbook also mentions how most people in the Civil War fought for different and changing reasons. In addition, people had expected the Southerners to be punished, but Abraham Lincoln …show more content…
Lincoln had made meaning out of the destruction and suffering that had happened in the Civil War, which is not an easy feat. From The Gettysburg College, “It attached transcendent meaning to the battle of Gettysburg, and turned the war-ravaged town left in its wake into a symbol of democracy and devotion to duty.” What this quote is telling us is that although the town may be destroyed and all the buildings were in rubble, it was more than just what the eye could see. The town and the soldiers resembled democracy and the soldier’s devotion to duty, they [the soldiers] did not die in vain.