Gettysburg

My visits up to New Jersey, by way of Pennsylvania to avoid tolls, sometimes took me up Route 15 from Frederick, Maryland to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a route which led close by to Gettysburg, which is roughly a half hour northeast of Frederick and close by Route 15.   On those occasions I had no time to stop by the battlefield, but with a more recent surplus of weekend time, I made it a point to visit.  No one else cared, so I went by myself.

Background.  From 1861-1865 our country, the USA, was embroiled in a costly Civil War which cost the lives of 620,000 men, more than our WWI and WWII casualties combined.  The war started well for the Confederates, led by mostly capable men such as Lee, Longstreet and Samuel L. “Stonewall” Jackson, but in 1863 a pair of major battles at Vicksburg in Mississippi and Gettysburg in Pennsylvania smacked the rebels down and put them on the defensive.  Within the next two years the Union, its armies now finally led by competent men like Grant & Sherman, battered down the CSA armies, capturing Atlanta and Richmond and driving them to surrender at Appomattox, Virginia in April 1865, almost four years to the date of the firing on Fort Sumter, South Carolina which started the war.

The battle itself took three days, July 1-3, 1863.  Confederate forces, led by Lee himself, collided with Union forces led by Meade.  On the first day the rebels succeeded at pushing back the Union forces south of the town itself, which eventually solidified into a “fishhook” mainly centered on the tactically superior higher ground. 

On the second day, Union forces on Little Round Top, the far southern flank of the fishhook, successfully fought off a heavy Confederate assault on the hill.  It reached the point where the Union commander, Colonel Chamberlain, realizing his men were almost out of ammunition and would be overrun by the next wave of Confederate attackers, decided to switch things around and ordered his men to fix bayonets and attack down the hill, a gutsy move which surprised the Confederates and overwhelmed them, defeating the rebel attempt to capture the high ground and saving the day. 

By the following day Pickett’s units finally showed up (well after he did) and Lee ordered a full frontal assault against the well-fortified Union lines on Cemetery Ridge.  Over open ground the rebels suffered heavy casualties from rifle and cannon fire, and only reached the Union lines at one point: the Angle, and all those rebel forces were killed.  Some of the artillery plaques noted that the guns fired canister against the rebels at point blank range.   

After the failure of Pickett’s Charge, the battle was over and the respective armies returned south.  The Union forces weren’t quick enough to capture Lee’s retreating armies, so the war had to go on for almost another two years.  However, the rebels were no longer strong enough to venture north again and were permanently on the defensive at this point, thus the battle represents a turning point in the war.

  

Four months later, Lincoln came and gave his famous Gettysburg Address.  I was a little late to witness it, but there’s a cemetery there now. 

1970s.  Back when I was living in the USA as a kid, my father and I, accompanied by three other father-son pairs, all of us Cub Scout or Webelos boys, visited Gettysburg on a camping trip.  Since this was around 1977 or 1978 my memories are hazy, except for a few details.  First off, the Visitor Center back then was much smaller; second, we toured the battlefield including Little Round Top and Devil’s Den; and third, we actually marched across the field from Pickett’s starting point all the way to the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge.   I enjoyed it but as noted above haven’t had the opportunity to revisit since then, notwithstanding passing close by several times.

Current visit.  The current visitor center is much larger and dates from the 2000s.   On Saturday, October 6, I saw the weather was overcast but not rainy.  I stopped by the visitor center and purchased a t-shirt, pint glass and fridge magnet, and then walked over to where the Union lines were on Cemetery Ridge.   I visited the Pennsylvania memorial which has a second story.  I walked down to Devil’s Den and up Little Round Top.  Then I walked back to my car in lot 3.  One of the guides at the visitor center warned that walking the entire battlefield area is a bit much, and he was right – all this walking, on its own, took over 2 hours.  I finished off the day by driving up into Gettysburg itself and then taking York Road back up northeast to Route 15.  Gettysburg features a small college and tons of stores, so it’s well worth visiting in its own right.  It’s another small US town which has succeeded at keeping its small town charm intact.   Maybe this has something to do with the battle.

The next day was sunny, so I decided to go back again.  This time I drove around the auto-tour route, going northwest and then down Confederate Road, a western path which runs through where Confederate lines were.  There’s a huge statute of General Bruce E. Lee up on his horse facing the Union lines, and back at Little Round Top the view with an afternoon sun is breathtakingly beautiful to the west.   I also checked out the visitor center’s museum, which had extensive s**t and nice narratives of each day’s battles. 

I remarked to one guy that if General Meade was as large as his statue, no wonder “we” won.  He laughed and replied, “y’all won.”  I observed other tourists wearing Stars & Bars insignia clearly showing their loyalties.  But everyone was in good spirits.  I couldn’t find any Broughtons listed on the New York memorials, although Ancestry.com lists multiple Broughtons from New York as having fought in the Civil War.  New York sent more troops to the Union than any other state, and of my relatives, the Broughtons were in New York at the time of the war.  I’ll keep looking.  [My uncle told me our direct ancestor was in the NY fire department during the war, suggesting that he was exempt from the draft as an essential worker back home in Brooklyn.]

Movie.  As noted in one of my prior blogs, they did make a movie of the battle (1993), with an A list cast:  Martin Sheen (Lee), Tom Berenger (Longstreet), Jeff Daniels (Joshua Chamberlain),  Oscar Goldman from the “Six Million Dollar Man” (Richard Anderson) as Union general Meade, George Lazenby from “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” as CSA General Pettigrew, Sam Elliott as Union cavalry general Buford, and even Ken Burns as a Union soldier.  It narrows its focus to the three days of the battle, its day two focus to Chamberlain’s heroic defense of Little Round Top and its day three focus to the ill-fated Pickett’s Charge, Pickett himself flamboyantly portrayed by Stephen Lang.  I also enjoyed Longstreet (Berenger)  having a candid chat with British observer Freemantle, correctly referring to England’s own civil war (1642-51) and accurately predicting that the British, who abolished slavery in 1833 and were very active in shutting down the slave trade, would be ill-inclined to support the Confederate cause.

Books.   The movie mentioned above is based on Michael Shaara’s 1976 book The Killer Angels, which I have not read.  I have read the trilogy by Newt Gingrich (yes, the former Republican congressman from Georgia), Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War, Grant Comes East, and Never Call Retreat: Lee And Grant: The Final Victory.  This is actually an alternative history narrative.  Unlike Harry Turtledove’s Timeline, beginning with How Few Remain and continuing for 10 more books beginning in 1914 and ending in 1945, Gingrich’s narrative doesn’t assume Antietam didn’t happen (1862 Union victory which dissuaded the British and French from supporting the CSA) but instead speculates on what might have happened if Meade and Lee didn’t stick around to do battle at Gettysburg, i.e. the battle itself never happened (no victory for either side).  I found the ultimate outcome surprising, which made reading the books actually fairly interesting.  

I strongly recommend a visit to Gettysburg, which should be de rigeur for Civil War buffs of either side (as noted above) and should be interesting enough even for those who don’t bleed blue (as I do) or grey.