To the LaVoy Family, His sacrifice is one that I will never forget... his is what America was made from... spiritual courage and fortitude that can only can come from Jesus Christ, God Almighty!! My heart is broken over this terrible injustice that has been committed against this American Hero, you, his precious family and all of his many friends. America morns for!! May the Dear Lord be with all of you and sustain you through your great loss. I feel it most appropriate, because LaVoy has entered into our History as another one of the brave men spoken of in the: "The Gettysburg Address" "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." President Abraham Lincoln November 19,1863