8. We're all Americans. It took the War Between the States to
make us one nation, indivisible. Before 1861, the United States
were loosely tied entities and always described as a plural
noun, as in, "The United States are in trade with France." The
war's bloodiest battle came at Gettysburg in 1863, with 51,000
casualties in just three days. Although the Union stopped
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Northern invasion, young men's
bodies littered the farms and gardens that had turned into a
battleground. Was the preservation of these united states worth
the cost in blood? At a memorial for the dead, Lincoln
intentionally called on the Union to persevere for a single
national ideal: "[T]hat 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."
The effect of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, just 272 words from
beginning to end, was radica