Four Days in July
Today we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But lost in all of the panoply of celebrating the Fourth, is the remembrance of July 1,2, and 3 in our nation's history.
Just eighty five years after the Founders signed the Declaration, America's long dance with the devil of slavery erupted into the bloodiest quadrille in our history. Slavery morphed into a political conflict over States' rights, to war, and on July 1, 1863, the bloodiest battle in the bloodiest War in our history. It began on this date in the beautiful, rolling farmland of south-central Pennsylvania, near a sleepy and theretofore unknown town called Gettsyburg.
