02/07/2023
160 years ago today my Immigrant ancestor Jeremiah McCarthy was severely wounded on the field at Gettysburg during the battles second day. As a boy he was lucky enough to escape the Potato Famine. As a young man in Boston he more than likely took the place of a wealthy young New York city scion for a bounty of a few hundred dollars. He served in the Tammany Regiment (42nd New York) from the beginning of the war to this date in 1863. On the third day of the battle his regiment plugged the gap in the Union line where Picketts Charge had penetrated, while he lay wounded out in front of where the 1st Minnesota fell. So this Fourth of July weekend remember those brave men who saved Our Union from the slave owning insurrectionists and their goober eaters.
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
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 here 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. " "Happy 4th of July"
