Memorial Day 2025

"It is for us the living... to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced." -A. Lincoln, brief remarks delivered at Gettysburg.

What we now call Memorial Day was born as Decoration Day, a uniquely American commemoration rising from the ashes of the Civil War. From 1861 to 1865, our nation endured unprecedented and almost unimaginable slaughter and devastation.

When the guns fell silent and the fallen were laid to rest, survivors—veterans and freedmen alike—sought a solemn way to honor those who had given the last full measure of devotion, in Abraham Lincoln’s immortal phrase at Gettysburg.

Decoration Day

Newly liberated by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and, ultimately, by the Thirteenth Amendment, former slaves joined Decoration Day observances. They understood that a “new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln promised, demanded more than the abolition of slavery—it required equal protection of the laws for the equal individual rights of each and every citizen, not group-based entitlements related to skin color, sex, sexual orientation, or current income.

Men and women who were slaves before the Civil War celebrated the sacrifice of soldiers who died so that this nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, might survive.

Inescapable American Tragedy

A regime of liberty and justice depends upon vigilant defense of its principles, not on centralized control by an elite unelected bureaucracy—a peril much greater now than in the postwar years when Decoration Days were born.

The German-style progressive staat we now have is emphatically not “the new birth of freedom” of which Lincoln spoke.

The unique and inescapable American tragedy is inseparable from our high moral aspirations: we were destined for some great reckoning over slavery because our practices did not align with the true and beautiful principles by which we justified our own independence and upon which we founded our new nation in 1776.

We abolished slavery barely two generations after our independence, yet hundreds of thousands perished in brother-against-brother combat over whether those “self-evident truths” would be mocked and discarded as “self-evident lies,” or provide the principled foundation for a morally decent self-governing constitutional republic that would stretch over many generations to come.

What Would You Risk?

Memorial Day reminds us that freedom is never free. It demands perpetual dedication—and that we honor both the fallen and the living who risk everything so that we may live with a government of our own choosing, a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

It is in this spirit that we recall Lincoln’s brief, solemn address at Gettysburg—etched forever in the marble walls of the Lincoln Memorial—words that should move us anew this and every Memorial Day:

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 battlefield 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 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.