July 3rd 1863 - The battle of Gettysburg decides the American Civil War

Gettysburg: The 3rd July 1863 was the climactic day when the American Civil war was decided at the Battle of Gettysburg: the Confederate and Union armies had assembled in this farming town of Southern Pennsylvania. They went there for 3 reasons - mainly because General Lee had secured a series of victories in Virgina and planned to assault the army of the Potomac and encircle Abraham Lincoln in the White House, cut off from his men. The town of Gettysburg, a sleepy farming town was a geographical magnet because it is a meeting point of 12 roads pointing in all directions; there is also an apocraphal rumour that there was a warehouse of new shoes in Gettysburg, and as most men lacked any serviceable boots, this was an irresistible inducement.

The battle started for real on July 2nd but was a stalemate. On the 3rd Southern General Lee gambled everything on a frontal assault, led by the Virginian Infantry of  George Pickett. Of the 12,000 men he led across the field to the Emmitsburg Road only half made it through the next hour before being repulsed by withering Union musket fire. From this point on the war was lost.
After the battle Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address: it is one of the greatest speeches ever written, and only 10 sentences long:
    "Four score 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 can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not 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."