Posted on 07/03/2020 11:59:42 AM PDT by buckalfa
This week marks the 157th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. As it happened, Union victory in Pennsylvania on July 3, and the surrender of Confederate forces at Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, portended a gradual death for the Southern rebellion. When the Confederacy collapsed in 1865, so, too, did the foundation of its apartheid society: institutionalized racial slavery.
Yet the ultimate success of Union arms was hardly a foregone conclusion in 1863. Emboldened by its victory at Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River, passed through Maryland, and raided south-central Pennsylvania. It plundered farms, enslaved freepersons, and terrorized local civilians. George Meade, appointed commander of the northern Army of the Potomac on June 28, understood the gravity of the moment; some of his soldiers had even lost confidence in their army. But morale increased and courage prevailed as Northern troops chased the rebels. Loyal citizens turned out in droves to cheer the men, with young girls greeting the army with flowers and bands performing patriotic airs.
At that point, sensing imminent battle, Meade issued a circular to his army. The nation looked anxiously to the men in federal blue for deliverance. Homes, firesides, and altars were at stake. Commanders were authorized to order the instant death of any soldier who failed in his duty.
The opposing armies closed in Gettysburg. Possessed of sound tactical vision, General John Fulton Reynolds dashed to the front and ordered Union infantry into the critical zone on July 1. Regarded as the ablest soldier in the Army of the Potomac, Reynolds paid with his life for such decisive leadership.
It wasn’t the brilliance of generals, however, that decided the battle’s fate. On the shoulders of common soldiers rested the future of the nation. These men cherished the Union as a model of self-government. It was the repository of timeless principles that, as Abraham Lincoln declared in 1857, established a “standard maxim for free society.” The hope of freedom this Republic afforded was “familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for,” and though “never perfectly attained,” nevertheless “constantly approximated.” Thus, this Union “augment[ed] the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
And so, Wisconsin volunteers responded to their commander’s call, when ordered to hold the Herbst Woodlot that July day, “if we can’t hold it, where will you find men who can?” The next afternoon, on Little Round Top, a professor-turned-colonel inspired men from Maine’s woods to defend their rocky, hilltop soil. His ammunition spent, Joshua Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge. On the third day, on Cemetery Ridge, a Union gunner fought to the last extremity, reloading, aiming, and firing his red-hot artillery pieces as members of his crews were struck down by bullets. The body of Alonzo Cushing was found with his thumb charred to the bone.
That November, after the dead were interred at the new national cemetery, an embattled president explained why America was exceptional in global history. The United States was a “new nation,” brought forth “four score and seven years ago”: new, not merely because it was conceived and had a beginning, but because nothing quite like it had existed before. Unlike European nation states—where identities derived from common languages, ethnicities, and religions—the U.S. was dedicated to a philosophical proposition, the ground truth of which was the immutable equality and dignity of persons. In 1787, when the framers of the new government congregated in Philadelphia to form “a more perfect Union,” they debated with great seriousness the future of slavery in the Republic. And the Constitution they crafted excluded the codification of slavery in national law. It was a grave wrong, as James Madison and others put the matter, to admit that there could be any right to property in persons. Since that founding, Lincoln had often argued, one section of the country had increased local protections for slavery to cement the wicked institution in society. But in the beginning, in the spirit and substance of national law, antislavery had been the blueprint for America. This, after all, was what the cruel war was all about.
In the end, the “new birth of freedom” of which Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg accomplished the destruction of racial slavery in the United States. This joyous outcome astounded the many millions of Americans who for years had trembled before slavery’s immense power and endured the horrors and depravations of civil war. But it wasn’t an inevitable result—a fact that invites us to consider the complex and uncertain interplay of history and progress.
In our time, we are often struck by impressions of America’s moral failures more than we are inclined to celebrate its achievements. This summer, racial violence and property destruction on city streets have caused many to question the noble promise inherent to the American ideal. Many have lost faith that the United States remains, as Lincoln believed, “the last, best hope of Earth,” a place where women and men, of all colors and socioeconomic stations, are free to run the race of life and achieve the fullness of their human potential. Now monuments are being toppled. A mayor has even voiced his support for removing from the public square a statue of the Great Emancipator himself.
We would be remiss to forget what loyal soldiers themselves believed as their columns marched toward Gettysburg and across the South in the summer of ‘63, hastening the end of the Civil War in America, and with it, the end of racial slavery. In spite of its failings, theirs was a nation “worthy of the saving.” As one volunteer officer, his legs shattered by bullets, wrote one year after the battle in his regimental report: “I regret the loss of the many gallant patriots who lost their lives or received honorable scars” in the desperate fighting. “But I rejoice,” he continued, that “it was in the battle of Gettysburg and in defense of human freedom and republican institutions.”
I was in Gettysburg several years ago and originally planned to take another trip there this summer, but then the virus hit and my summer vacation plans were ruined.
The American Battlefield Trust used to be the Civil War Trust. The name was changed a few years ago because the NPS urgently asked for help on Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites as well. The Trust is focused on preservation; it raises money to buy dirt to save battlefields. In a little over 20 years it has saved over 55,000 acres, which compares favorably with 85,000 acres saved by the National Park Service in over a century. It's an excellent charity.
I was in Gettsyburg quite a number of years ago but do want to go back again. I was only there one day and tried to see as much as I could but it made for such an exhausting and hectic time I’d like to go back a bit more leisurely and soak in the atmosphere.
Have the removed all the Confederate markers and memorials yet??
Bkmk
Hey! This is really cool! Thank you :)
I have toured Gettysburg several times—and the best tour was not geographical, but chronological!
We walked the battlefield three times, for each day, in the order of the fighting. And we walked Pickett’s charge. No one did that other than my family. Empty field full of chiggers. . .
The Civil War is amazing and the battles are so interesting and it is so sad that kids now know nothing about it.
I’m Canadian and my great great grandmother lost a cousin in the 110th Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry at Gettysburg and another at a battle in Maryland. Her brother was with the 14th Independent Battery, Massachusetts Light Artillery and he lost an eye and a hand at the Battle of Ball’s bluff... An early engagement of the war.
True patriots born in Newfoundland Canada, who died and fought for the union cause.
Exactly! You could spend years there and not see everything.
I was fortunate to visit the Battlefield in 1998. Me and the family did a self guided tours and found the Devil’s Den and Roundtops to be haunting. The second day we somehow wound up with pretty much a private guided tour of the cornfield and Cemetary Ridge after a light fog rolled in after a thunderstorm. The young lady park ranger must have had theater experience as she conducted the tour from the first person view of Armistead. It was an eerie experience.
I just returned from Gettysburg today. I spent two full days there, still not enough time. I walked from the angle over to Seminary Ridge and back yesterday. Chilling feeling when, half way across, you imagine the fire Pickett and Pettigrew were taking from the ridge ahead, Cemetery Hill on the left and Little Round Top on the right.
We spent two days there two years ago in May, Lodged at the Baladerry Inn, an amazing and beautiful place. My psychic senses were in extreme overload. Period. I stood on a bright, warm sunny day like it would be in July at the corner of the Wheatfield and was in awe. Gettysburg is sacred ground. If any profane it may they be sent to eternal damnation.
H. L. Mencken
The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of every day. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.
Because there were so many causalities, the record keeping for the Union Army consolidated its list to “July 2 AND July 3. I don’t know the exact date of my great great grandfather’s wounding at Gettysburg, but I know he sent nine months in Army hospitals before he was discharged. He fought with the 8th New Jersey Volunteers, a unit formed from volunteers from Newark and surrounding towns. We are very proud of Private James E Jones.
Ageed, worth saving and fighting for. If those who disagree want to fight, let’s not waste time.........bring it.
When the Confederacy collapsed in 1865, so, too, did the foundation of its apartheid society: institutionalized racial slavery.
Take note of the incompetent use of an emotionally loaded word for rhetorical effect. South African apartheid was a system of national segregation, not just some nasty catch-all term for abusing black people. Segregation was largely introduced into the South by Northerners after the war and South African apartheid had nothing to do with slavery. The two systems are mutually exclusive. Slavery is the very reason one could reasonably expect to see blacks moving about in almost all parts of the South in a way one would not see in The Cape.
Unlike European nation states—where identities derived from common languages, ethnicities, and religions—the U.S. was dedicated to a philosophical proposition, the ground truth of which was the immutable equality and dignity of persons.
What a despicably stupid thing for an "historian" to write! Essentially all of the old Eastern Hapsburgian holdings produced state governments composed of multiple nationalities and religions. Even The United Kingdom, from which the Americans are derived, possessed easily differentiated races and languages and had a history of inter-religious turmoil. Even their ruling elite continued to speak French (of a sort) for half a millennia after the conquest. This "America is a propositional nation" crap is right out of the leftist playbook. The founding generation was very strongly of the opinion that we were one people, perhaps even a self-actualized new race of people, called "Americans" and they very definitely did not anticipate any language other than English being the national language. As for religion, most seem to lean toward the notion of a developing syncretism which would obviate the need to any faction to deny the essential Christianity of another. "Propositional America" is Frankfurt-school drivel which we have to identify and eliminate. You should not swallow poison just because it been sweetened with Kool-Aid, and you should not patronize garbage from psuedo-conservatives just because it appeals to some childish desire that the stories of our lives should be simplistic morality tales.
Around 50,000 of your countrymen served in the Union Army or the United States Navy during the war.
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