Gettysburg should have ended the war, for General Lee, on
retreating southward, found the Potomac River so swollen by heavy rains
that he was obliged to wait several days for the floods to go down. In
that time it would have been quite possible for General Meade, the Union
commander, to follow him and utterly destroy his army. He proved too
slow, however, and Lee and his beaten Confederate soldiers escaped.
President Lincoln was inexpressibly grieved at this, and in the first
bitterness of his disappointment sat down and wrote General Meade a
letter. Lee "was within your easy grasp," he told him, "and to have
closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have
ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. ...
Your golden opportunity is gone and I am distressed immeasurably because
of it." But Meade never received this letter. Deeply as the President
felt Meade's fault, his spirit of forgiveness was so quick, and his
thankfulness for the measure of success that had been gained, so great,
that he put it in his desk, and it was never signed or sent.

The battle of Gettysburg was indeed a notable victory, and coupled with
the fall of Vicksburg, which surrendered to General Grant on that
same third of July, proved the real turning-point of the war. It seems
singularly appropriate, then, that Gettysburg should have been the place
where President Lincoln made his most beautiful and famous address.
After the battle the dead and wounded of both the Union and Confederate
armies had received tender attention there. Later it was decided to
set aside a portion of the battlefield for a great national military
cemetery in which the dead found orderly burial. It was dedicated to its
sacred use on November 19, 1863. At the end of the stately ceremonies
President Lincoln rose and said:

"Fourscore 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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate--we cannot consecr