Travel to Gettysburg National Military Park with the Gettysburg Tourism Bureau & the National Park Service at Gettysburg, PA

Listen to Cruise with Bruce Radio show guests: Katie Lawhon from the Gettysburg National Military Park and Carl Whitehill from the Gettysburg Visitor's Bureau as they talk about the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and Gettysburg's 3 day battle.

It's been 150 years since the dreary days when several slave-holding Southern States declared their intentions to secede from the Union of the the United States of America. It was just a short time after the election of President Abraham Lincoln. It all started when the legislature of South Carolina passed an ordinance stating that the "Union is Dissolved" on December 20, 1860 and published it in the Charleston Mercury Newspaper. The struggle between ideologies of states rights vs. a strong Federal Government was as controversial then as it is today. And the Southern agrarian, slave-holding states believed that their rights were being trampled on by the Industrial Northern Yankees. It was inevitable that there would be a Civil War between the North and South.

On April 12, 1861 the first canon blasts were hurled at Ft Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. President Abraham Lincoln called on the states that had not joined the Confederate States to supply 75,000 volunteers to suppress the insurrection.  By the end of the war, four years later over 600,000 men lost their lives. More lives were lost during this Civil War than during any other time in our nations history. And the loss of life at Gettysburg topped the list.