 It was about principles that were at stake. Abraham Lincoln would later capture this. He gave that very famous Gettysburg Address in November of that same year. I think it was November 19th, 1863 that he delivered it. One of the greatest speeches in American history. He reminded us in that speech that war was testing whether a nation that was, as he put it, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could endure.