It was a living bolt and sped as if
resistless. It reached and touched the flaming line of the embattled
blue. It pierced the line. For one brief moment in the sharp agony of
mortal strife it held its own. It was the supreme moment of the peril of
the Union. It was the heroic crisis of the war. But the fiery force was
spent. In one last, wild, tumultuous struggle brave men dashed headlong
against men as brave, and the next moment that awful bolt of daring
courage was melted in the fervent heat of an equal valor, and the battle
of Gettysburg was fought.
If the rising sun of the Fourth of July, 1863, looked upon a sad and
unwonted scene, a desolated battlefield, upon which the combatants upon
either side had been American citizens, yet those combatants could they
have seen aright would have hailed that day as more glorious than ever
before. For as the children of Israel beheld Moses descending amid the
clouds and thunder of the sacred mount bearing the divinely illuminated
law, so from that smoking and blood-drenched field on which all hope of
future union might seem to have perished utterly, they would have seen a
more perfect union rising, with the constitution at last immutably
interpreted, and they would have heard, before they were uttered by
human lips, the words of which Gettysburg is the immortal pledge to
mankind, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall
not perish from the earth.
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