9781422287453

40 The Declaration of Independence: Forming a New Nation

A handwritten copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, on paper with theWhite House’s letter- head. Delivered 87 years after the Declaration of Independence was writ- ten, the Gettysburg Address asserted again that in America, all men are created equal, whether black or white. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution; it forever ended slavery in the United States.

end of slavery and Southerners demanding “states’ rights,” meaning they wished to determine for them- selves whether to keep slavery. Finally, the furor over the issue erupted into the Civil War. On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Just a few months earlier, the Union Army had won a decisive yet bloody victory there against the army of the Confederacy. The battle of Gettysburg had turned the tide of the war in favor of the Union Army, and would mark the beginning of the final chapter in the Civil War, and along with it the end of slavery in America. Lincoln arrived in Gettysburg to help dedicate a