Happy 4th of July 2022 to All Our Members & Families from the United Federation LEOS-PBA Executive Board & our affiliated unions and divisions.
On July 4, 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee began his retreat from Gettysburg. The campaign had been his second attempt to bring the war to the north and, once again, it had failed. Fortunately for Lee, the Army of the Potomac was too weak to pursue, and the Army of Northern Virginia would live to fight another day. And yet, Gettysburg was a turning point in the war. Never again would Confederate armies bring the war north.
Months later, President Abraham Lincoln travelled to Gettysburg to help dedicate a resting place for the many who died here. He gave a two-minute address which changed the world:
“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…
The world will little note, or 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 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—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.”