ate--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
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."

With these words, so brief, so simple, so full of reverent feeling, he
set aside the place of strife to be the resting place of heroes, and
then went back to his own great task--for which he, too, was to give
"the last full measure of devotion."

Up to within a very short time little had been heard about Ulysses S.
Grant, the man destined to become the most successful general of the
war. Like General McClellan, he was a graduate of West Point; and also
like McClellan, he had resigned from the army after serving gallantly in
the Mexican war. There the resemblance ceased, for he had not an atom of
McClellan's vanity, and his persistent will to do the best he could with
the means the government could give him was far removed from the younger
general's faultfinding and complaint. He was about four years older than
McClellan, having been born on April 27, 1822. On offering his services
to the War Department in 1861 he had modestly written: "I feel myself
competent to command a regiment if the President in his judgment should
see fit to intrust one to me." For some reason this letter remained
unanswered, although the Department, then and later, had need of trained
and experienced officers. Afterward the Governor of Illinois made him
a colonel of one of the three years' volunteer regiments; and from that
time on he rose in rank, not as McClellan had done, by leaps and bounds,
but slowly, earning every promotion. All of his service had been in
the West, and he first came into general notice by his persistent and
repeated efforts to capture Vicksburg, on whose fall the opening of
the Mississippi River depe