"The month begins with things that perish. But ultimately, November is a journey of hope, as was Lincoln's journey to Gettysburg. So too I will journey to Gettysburg in these pages. Like Lincoln's fellow citizens, I go there to assuage personal grief, to find answers; and I hope, for me as for them, that my personal sorrows become a vehicle for larger answers and a larger purpose. Lincoln addressed their grief, why not mine; he gave his generation purpose, why not ours."
Kent Gramm is Program Director of the Seminary Ridge Historical Preservation Foundation and author of Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values and Somebody's Darling: Essays on the Civil War, forthcoming from Indiana University Press.