During three days in July 1863 at Gettysburg, approximately 50,000 men were killed, wounded, or declared missing, including one-quarter of the entire Union force and more than one-third of the Confederate army. Four months later, on Thursday, November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the battlefield in Pennsylvania as a national cemetery for the soldiers who were killed there, calling for renewed devotion so that the dead would not have died in vain, that the nation would have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth. Of the five known manuscript copies of the address, the Library of Congress owns the two Lincoln gave to his private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay; Nicolay gave his copy to Hay in 1901, and Hay's descendents donated both copies to the Library of Congress in 1917. When Lincoln became president on March 4, 1861, slavery was legal in 15 of the 34 states. After the defeat of Confederate forces at Antietam, he issued a preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862, declaring that as of January 1, 1863, all persons held as slaves in states or parts of states still in rebellion would be free, and on January 1, 1863, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Although it did not immediately free enslaved people, it established a principle, helped lead to the 13th Amendment of December 18, 1865, and announced that black men would be accepted into the Army and Navy. By the end of the Civil War, about 160,000 black men had fought in the Union Army and another 20,000 had served in the Navy; approximately 35,000 lost their lives, and 23 received the Medal of Honor.
