Honoring the fallen Union soldiers of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln eloquently said, “The world … can never forget what they did here.”

It is appropriate that the Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1-3, just before Independence Day, since it was in a very literal sense a battle for freedom. The Confederates had swept through Pennsylvania, rounding up as many black men, women, and children as they could, including lifelong freedmen, in accordance with the Confederate Congress’s Retaliatory Act. The Union soldiers at Gettysburg were fighting for the survival of our entire Republic and the fate of black Americans in particular.

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee had won a victory at Chancellorsville and marched into Pennsylvania in late June 1863. As noted above, many of them — under orders from Lee, the Confederate Congress, and Jefferson Davis — spent their time trying to round up new slaves. By July 1, the Confederates clashed with Gen. George G. Meade’s troops at Gettysburg. The battle included fatal mistakes by J.E.B. Stuart and Lee, and heroics from George Custer. On July 3, Lee ordered 15,000 troops to attack the Union troops on Cemetery Ridge in the failed “Pickett’s Charge.” On Independence Day itself, July 4, Lee had to withdraw.

One of the Democrat ways of rewriting history was to talk only about the brilliance and successes of their Confederate generals, never their failures and war crimes. While Union Gen. Meade was not a very good general — until U.S. Grant took charge of the Union armies there was not a commanding general militarily greater than the Confederate leaders — he had officers who fought very heroically and well at Gettysburg, not to mention the enlisted men who stood their ground against the recently victorious Confederates. The repulse of Pickett’s (failed) Charge illustrated the talent and courage of a number of Union officers and soldiers very clearly.

Read Also: July 2: The First Independence Day

Again, Gettysburg came at a crucial time not only strategically on the battlefield but also philosophically and morally — that is, at a time when even those who had originally denied the Civil War was about slavery were beginning to acknowledge that the Confederates were certainly always fighting for slavery, even if the Union hadn’t admitted it at the start. The immortal Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in Confederate states, was issued Jan. 1, 1863. “Everyone seemed to feel a new sort of exhilarating life,” said John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary, after Lincoln issued the historic Proclamation. “The President’s proclamation had freed them as well as the slaves.” Suddenly the fact that this war was about the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers became crystal clear, and the Union understood that they could either destroy slavery or see slavery destroy America.

Just before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, in Dec. 1862, Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued a proclamation of his own. This document, rarely if ever taught in schools now, introduced the almost forgotten but highly destructive and disgusting Confederate policy of treating white officers of black Union troops and their black soldiers as slaves or criminals instead of as prisoners-of-war (POWs). It was the result of Jefferson Davis’s belief, which he had expressed years before, that “African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.” In May 1863, the Confederate Congress made the policy official law with The Retaliatory Act, which very explicitly stated that it aimed to protect the “institution of African slavery.” And don’t take my word for it — read the words of this infamous act for yourself (emphasis added):

“[A]ll captives taken by the confederate forces ought to be dealt with and disposed of by the confederate government. . .That every white person, being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who, during the present war, shall command negroes or mulattoes in arms against the confederate States, or who shall arm, train, organize, or prepare negroes or mulattoes for military service against the confederate States, or who shall voluntarily aid negroes or mulattoes in any military enterprise, attack, or conflict in such service, shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, be put to death, or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the court. . .

All negroes and mulattoes who shall be engaged in war or taken in arms against the confederate States, or shall give aid or comfort to the enemies of the Confederate States, shall, when captured in the Confederate States, be delivered to the authorities of the State or States in which they shall be captured, to be dealt with according to the present or future laws of such State or States [laws which included re-enslavement and/or execution].”

Reportedly, when Union commander U.S. Grant later demanded that black Union troops be included in prisoner exchanges, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee coldly responded that “property” would not be included. Grant was so infuriated at the treatment of Union POWs following the Retaliatory Act that he stopped prisoner exchanges altogether. In practice, because of the Act, the Confederates rounded up every black person of any age whom they could seize, particularly devastating parts of Pennsylvania. The white citizens of Greencastle, PA, defied the Confederates and captured back some of the black Pennsylvanians, but an unknown number of them were successfully enslaved by the Confederates and became lost to history. That is the backdrop of Gettysburg, the heinous and hideous context of the battle that ended on this day.

So, when the Union soldiers defeated the Confederates and drove them out of Pennsylvania, they not only won a military and strategic victory, they won a victory for justice, liberty, and equality — our founding principles — and against the pernicious evil of slavery. The arrogant Confederates who seized and shot at black women and children and enslaved them came to Gettysburg and lost, badly.

Black men could vote in most states originally when the Constitution was ratified, and most of the greatest Founders, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams, understood slavery would have to be abolished or America could not live up to its founding principles. But the Democrats were so fanatically dedicated to slavery that it took a Civil War to end slavery and save America from premature death. The Union heroes of Gettysburg were key in achieving that ultimate victory in the War.

And so we honor them today, the white and black patriots who staked their lives and shed their blood in order to save the United States and end slavery. Now their cause has been passed to us, because the Democrats/Confederates lost the Civil War but they never stopped undermining America and threatening constitutional rights. They are as vicious and determined now as the Confederate troops ever were. As Abraham Lincoln said:

“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.”

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