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.
Have the removed all the Confederate markers and memorials yet??
Bkmk
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.
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.
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.
1st Minnesota