On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln gave a short speech (lasting no more than two minutes) at the commemoration of a cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where more than fifty-one thousand Union and Confederate soldiers had died in a battle lasting three days, from July 1 to 3, 1863. This historic battle ended General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North, but Lincoln chose to focus not on the Union victory but on the principles he believed the war had been fought over: liberty and equality as they had been defined in the Declaration of Independence. In a speech that is now considered the most eloquent ever delivered by an American president, he saw this battle and the war itself as leading toward a “new birth of freedom.”