Gettysburg

There's been a lot in the news recently - and actually for once a lot of it is worthwhile.  The death of Arizona firefighters, the reverberations from a historical Supreme Court Session, yet another round of protests in Egypt. It's little surprise that, at least from where I am sitting down here in God's Country, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg has been something of an afterthought.

Of course the fact that I live in Virginia may explain some of that...

I had the very good fortune to spend two days on the battlefield with my dad about 12 years ago.  Civil War scholarship is a hobby of my father's, though I am not 100% sure why.  He spends the second half of each year reading about the Civil War or people associated with it -- though there are those years where the book he chooses is so detailed and he is otherwise so busy that he can only make it through one text in 6 months, if that -- and when we went to the field Gettysburg had been the focus of his studies for several years.  He knew the order of battle down to the regiment virtually everywhere, and in a few places even down to the company.  No need for a tour guide that time.

It was a memorable trip, but the highlight for me, the thing I will never forget as long as I live, was walking Pickett's Charge.  For those of you deciding not to click on the link, Pickett's Charge was the assault by Confederate troops on the Union center on the third and final day of the battle.  Lee, after assaulting the flanks of the Union line on the previous day, decided that he must attack the center based on the principle that do the same thing over and over again and expect different results is a sign of insanity, so obviously something else had to be tried.  The Union center was the only option left.    

No, that isn't strictly true.  Though his intentions, target, and the wisdom of the charge are all hotly debated, it seems his goal was to break the Union center and pour troops into the breach and roll up the Union lines while using a cavalry assault from the rear to exploit the gap.  A massive artillery bombardment would pave the way by destroying Union artillery and demoralizing enemy infantry at the focal point.  As it was the bombardment was ineffectual, and while some Confederate troops did break the Union line there was not enough of them and they were easily repulsed with a counterattack by Union reserves.  

Why my dad and I were so keen to walk it I am not so sure.  In this hyper-political day and age, where an act as simple as buying a chicken sandwich can taint a person with the stain of intolerance, it seems like only those with some affinity for the South and her cause would dare walk the charge at all.  But that was certainly not the case with us.  I'll admit we had some admiration for some of the South's generals and soldiers as fighting men, but we had no illusions of the odious institution of slavery that lay at the heart of the Confederate cause (see postscript for more on this) and we had (and have) no wish to see the south rise again as some people, inexplicably, still do.  We walked the charge because it seemed like something worth doing, and it certainly was.

We started out at a monument to James Longstreet (who ironically was not in favor of the charge) and headed towards the copse of trees, the oft quoted but still debatable visual target for the charge. We walked toward the Union lines at a small distance apart from each other, not speaking, each lost in our own thoughts.  We were nearly to the angle in the stonewall under the copse when it happened.  

I looked over to my left, and I swear to this day I saw a host of Confederate soldiers clothed in their tattered butternut uniforms with their battle flags flying, the men shouting to keep their spirits up.  When I looked forward towards the slight ridge and low wall that defined the Union line I saw a pair of men with slouched caps and the muzzle of a cannon.  There was a flash from the cannon and I felt -- and heard -- the thud of a ball of canister shot hitting me in the chest.  

I was dead.  

And then it all disappeared.  I was back in an empty field, my father now somewhat ahead of me, on a rainy summer day in Gettysburg.  

I can hear you all reaching for the bullshit flags right now.  There are those who would say that in some past life I probably died at Gettysburg fighting for the South, but in spite of that experience I don't believe in re-incarnation.  The more astute of you would probably also tell me that the Union artillery were behind the line of infantry in position at the stone wall, so I couldn't have possibly seen a cannon -- my vision or whatever you want to call it was historically inaccurate.  Others would remind me of the biscuits and gravy I'd had that morning for breakfast, northern biscuits and gravy that were not sitting well in my southern stomach, and quip that there was more gravy than grave about the visions I saw.

Just so.  Still, rational though I am (often to a fault), I reserve the right to believe in things supernatural, things that simply cannot be explained.  

I believe that is quite possible that in places like Gettysburg, full of so much death and violence and ideal and elan, some kind of imprint gets left behind that can manifest itself later.  It's like that feeling you get at night when you don't feel quite alone, that some specter from the past is hanging around in the living room, meaning no harm, maybe not even cognizant of itself, but just passing through like a chilly mist on a way point to somewhere else, an etching from a previous life.

It makes sense to me, then, that the visions I saw were an etching, a remnant, of the men who died in the throes of our nation's great and tragic crisis.  It is my hope in relating this story to you (aside from it being a pretty neat story) that you might pause to remember those who died in that struggle, and mull over the words that one of the greatest of men would forever immortalize in their honor:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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 on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, 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 it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 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 gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

~Abraham Lincoln                                                                

PS: Let the Gettysburg Address sink in for a bit.  I am about to ruin the moment.  Go get a glass of water or something.

You back?  Excellent.  Let's crack on.

So, when I was in the Boy Scouts and we could stop thinking or talking about girls long enough to focus on something else we used to actually discuss if slavery was THE cause of the Civil War or not, if it was rather a battle over states rights.  As I grew up in Southwest Virginia there were plenty of us (myself not among them) who argued that slavery was not the cause of the war, and one of the crutches holding up this precarious argument was the rumor that the great James I. Robertson Jr., Civil War historian and a professor at Virginia Tech, had said so.

The man, and the class he taught, are justly legendary.  I was told that the course had a waiting list years long, and he would flat out tell you that slavery did not cause "The War Between the States" or "The War of Northern Aggression" or (my favorite) "The War to Prevent Southern Independence".

You can imagine my horrible, self-satisfied, smugfuckingly smug smile when one of the first sentences to be drawled by Professor Robertson in his peculiar Danville accent when I did take his class (no waiting list, by the by) was "Make no doubt about it:  Slavery was the cause of this war."  Clearly, he realized his reputation proceeded him.  

Though I will say one thing about prof. Robertson to his detriment:  he was the historical consultant for the movie "Gods and Generals", and he was extremely proud of this, told us many times that it was a fine film.  

Well, I saw that movie in the theaters, and in my opinion it was horrible.  It was some 4 hours long, and during the intermission everyone in the crowd, all eight of us, asked one another if we should struggle through the rest or if we should just call it a night and try to impress the coffee girls at the local hippie bakery by showing them how we had mastered a whole slew of asymmetric chess openings.  We all decided to hang with the movie based on principle, and I believe all of us regret it still.