By the end of the battle the next day the rebels were in
full retreat, but over 13,000 Union soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing,
and nearly 11,000 rebels had met the same fate.
Shiloh turned out to be a major victory for the United States Army,
opening up nearly the whole western part of the rebel confederacy to
invasion. The impact of the victory was missed
by much of the population of the loyal states, however, whose senses reeled
from a bill of losses of husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers never seen
before in the life of the Republic. General
U.S. Grant, whose coolness under pressure made the victory possible, was
mercilessly criticized in the press.
The nation little understood that the casualties of Shiloh
would be only the first of many tens of thousands more who would suffer from
civil war in the land of Washington and Jefferson before 1862 would be over. Then there would be 1863, 1864, and 1865 to
follow, running the tally of destruction ever higher. In 1865, near the end of the war, Abraham
Lincoln summed up in his marvelous second inaugural address—for a term of
office that would last the rest of his life, less than 6 weeks—“Neither party
expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already
attained. . . . Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental
and astounding.”
All Americans today benefit from that profound victory and
the others that brought an end to the rebellion and that upheld the
Constitution. It was a strange and new
thing for the world that the words on a piece of paper, written by men of an
earlier generation, could create a system of government and affect so many
lives. It was the lives of those who
fought to sustain the Constitution that gave it that life, men who insisted on
living by those words and organizing a free society within the protections of
its provisions.
The same is true today, as with each generation: we are called upon to uphold that
Constitution, those words on a piece of paper, and hand it on down, as strong
as ever, to our children. Those men who
died at Shiloh cannot do our work for us today.
Neither can the men who fought and died in Europe and the South Pacific
and on many other places of battle. Just
as important as those who died to preserve the Constitution are those who have
lived to maintain the Constitution.
They, however, could do no more than pass that freedom under constitutional
law to us. We have it today. What will we do with it?
As Ronald Reagan taught in his 1967 inaugural address as
Governor of California,
Freedom is a fragile thing and is never
more than one generation away from extinction.
We must not let it become extinct. It is under challenge from enemies without,
who hate the freedom and worth of the individual enshrined in the U.S.
Constitution, and it is endangered by those within the nation—some in very high
places of power and responsibility— who see the Constitution as a barrier in
the way of their plans to replace individual rights, value, initiative, and
worth with the ages old system where the government and the governors run the lives
of the people and decide who wins, who loses, who gets what, and how much.
Our forebears fought a revolution and crafted a new system
in the New World to get away from that rule by the few. The lesson we need to learn anew, is that it
is the job of the many individuals who make up each generation to win that
freedom again, because there will always be those eager to impose their will on
others and use and direct and take the resources that they themselves did not
earn, who will want to have their way with other people’s money and other
people’s lives.
No one’s sacrifice is the same as anyone else’s. Read no unfairness in that, because to
sacrifice is to absorb unfairness. But we cannot avoid the call to sacrifice. Not even Christ, the greatest of all, could.
As we celebrate Easter we should remember the sacrifices of
the Savior, by which He absorbed all unfairness. Those sacrifices made Easter possible, by
which all that is wrong is overcome and ultimate freedom bought for each person
born into this world. We are privileged
by Christ to be given the chance to join in that effort to preserve and extend
the blessings of freedom to our families, our friends, and to people we do not know
and may never meet.
At Gethsemane, then Golgotha, and from the Garden Tomb, Christ
has created the framework that makes freedom possible. He inspired the founders who built a nation
of freedom as the beacon to all mankind that it has been for over 200 years. As our Easter worship, let us take up the
last call given by Abraham Lincoln to the nation as the Constitution was
reaffirmed in struggle, who recognized the great value of America for the world:
With malice toward none, with charity
for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us
strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care
for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do
all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and
with all nations.
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