I have a habit of memorializing July 3, 1863 — the end date of the Battle of Gettysburg. When I’m home, I will usually stream Episode Five of The Civil War by Ken Burns: The Universe of Battle. (Actually, I still own the DVD box set.) I’ve written about this habit of mine before. Indeed, I texted friends of mine “Happy July 3rd!”
I believe Gettysburg matters now more than ever because the victory there opened America to a possibility of “a new birth of freedom.” But that possibility can still be lost.
Now, I realize you’re probably reading this while celebrating Independence Day 2025. You might be thinking, isn’t “The Fourth,” which celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the holiday that matters? If July 3rd was a big deal, you might argue, it would be a holiday too. Maybe you’re lauding the fact that the Declaration pronounced that “all men are created equal.”
But that proposition, while an eloquent and seminal idea, isn’t the entire story. Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the Declaration, wrote, then under pressure, deleted an anti-slavery passage from the Declaration. Even after the Revolution, slavery shaped the framing of the Constitution and divided the United States for decades. Indeed, Fredrick Douglass, lauded abolitionist and civil rights activist, pointed out in 1852 the meaningless of celebrating the liberty and equality proclaimed on the Fourth of July in the face of chattel slavery. All persons may have been created equal, but slavery created a caste system that divided America.
This entrenched conflict over slavery came to a head in the Civil War, and 87 after the founding, on July 1-3, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg was fought. To quote the Smithsonian Institution’s essay celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg was “the moment of decision” for the conflict.
“Gettysburg changed everything,” the Smithsonian essay continues. After the defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia, “[t]he North began to see Robert E. Lee as a mortal, a flawed individual capable of being defeated. Also, coupled with General Ulysses Grant’s vanquishing of the last southern stronghold on the Mississippi—Vicksburg fell on July 4, the day after the conclusion of Gettysburg—the North believed that the Union cause had finally acquired military leaders capable of prosecuting the war.”
The possibility of new liberty through Union victory became clear in July 1863.
And with victory in April 1865 came Reconstruction, and with it the abolition of legal slavery, the redefinition of citizenship, and the creation of the foundation of the civil and political rights in America today. Yet, as quickly as these rights were articulated, these rights were betrayed through political manipulation, judicial undercutting, and open racial violence. Nearly a century of Jim Crow segregation ensued, and America needed protest from Selma to Washington to lead to a Second Reconstruction that (re-) establish the promise of formal civil and political rights for all. And even today, the terms of Reconstruction are still being debated and can be lost.
But without the conclusion of the Civil War, and the turning of the tide of that war made at Gettysburg, the United States as we know it now could never have existed. Indeed, without the victory at Gettysburg, Lincoln could not have articulated in his famous address at the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield, a new declaration for the United States:
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.
To read July 3rd along with July 4th, to see the scope of America as ranging from Independence Day to Gettysburg, from the Colfax Massacre to Selma, from the beginning to today and all the struggle in between, is to recognize that the work of Reconstruction remains incomplete.
It is to celebrate how far American has come, but to recognize how far America has to go to fulfill its promise. Propositions that we used to think of as well settled — like birthright citizenship, a universal right to vote, and a commitment to liberty and justice for all — remain contested a century and a half later.
And so long as we debate whether some have rights, and others suffer as a consequence, none of us is truly free. And the work of changing this for the better, of making us all free is, in Lincoln’s words, “the great task remaining before us.”
Atiba Ellis 