Posted on 06/22/2005 9:43:16 PM PDT by quidnunc
Now that it's officially summer, here's my advice to parents who want to continue teaching their kids during the next two months and learn something themselves: visit Civil War battlefields. I probably overdid it with my own children, visiting about 35 in all, but here are my top five:
1. Gettysburg (July 1863)
Much as I'd like to make a surprise choice, there's no avoiding Gettysburg's primacy and sadness, with over 50,000 soldiers becoming casualties over three days.
Driving and walking this Pennsylvania battlefield explains much: the big rocks of Devil's Den were indeed devilish, and the awesome difficulty of "Pickett's Charge" — across a vast expanse, sloping slightly uphill — makes it seem that Robert E. Lee's hope that day was for God to intervene. (That's what Michael Shaara suggested in his fine novel, "The Killer Angels"; it's well worth reading before a Gettysburg visit.)
2. Antietam (September 1862)
The 30-acre Maryland cornfield through which soldiers charged and countercharged is still a cornfield; the farm road worn down by erosion and called Sunken Road until it gained a new name at the battle, Bloody Lane, is also a good place to meditate on 23,000 casualties incurred in one day.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Was it really a civil war, I thought the south was just trying to Secede and not try to overthrow Washington DC?
anyway, good article, been to Fredericksburg and to Gettysburg a few times http://www.yaac-bsa.org/activities/gettysburg/gettysburg.htm
I've always wanted to visit Antietam.
Too many of these fields are being nibbled away by commercial developments at an alarming rate. Unless more effort is made to preserve them our progeny will be totally dependent on other people's interpretations (books, CDs, DVDs, etc.).
Antietam is well worth seeing, and I hope you make it there sometime.
All of the battlefields mentioned in the article are worth going to, but some of the more out of the way sites left the deepest impression on me. The half dozen battlefields around the time of the Seven Days Before Richmond campaign are truly haunting, not only the large ones, like Malvern Hill, but especially the smaller ones like Gain's Mill and Bever Dam Creek.
Something you might enjoy!
Visited Antietam just last week. Very beautiful, peaceful, and isolated. The Bloody Lane. Burnside Bridge. Very difficult to imagine the horrors of 140-some years ago there. Unlike Gettysburg where, if you've seen the movie, you can see it all in your mind. Walked that mile in the footsteps of Pickett's charge. Once again, very difficult to recreate in my mind the courage that would have been required to step out across that field in 1863 under cannon fire. Instead, my little daughter picked flowers along the way. We have so little idea these days how much all we have cost our fathers and grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers.
Probably?
35 is "probably?"
That sounds more like borderline child abuse.
Gettysburg is haunted.
The other thing about Antietam. A mile or so away is Sharpsburg, where it seems the whole downtown Main Street has been preserved...all the Civil War era buildings still standing and still in use.
His list (hit the source link for his reasoning):
1.Gettysburg
2.Antietam
3.Chancellorsville
4.Shiloh
5.Fredericksburg
President Eisenhower's granddaughter, who grew up on the family farm at Gettysburg, told my wife and me the same thing...that strange things happen there.
You can't say that on this forum! If you do, you'll be called an environmentalist whacko, a green Nazi, anti-business, anti-free enterprise, anti-property rights. Speaking as a right winger who works for historic preservation on a regular basis, I've been told that none of our historic lands need to be protected from sprawl, and that trying to stop them from being destroyed for the sake of a new Jiffy-Lube makes me a liberal.
Antietam is deeply moving. Especially on an early-fall day. The most amazing and moving sight is the annual Illumination, in which volunteers light a candle for each of the soldiers killed at Sharpsburg, and set it out on the field. You don't realize what a horror it was until you see those candles in their thousands, spreading out across the hillsides, each one the symbol of a single flickering soul.
They're all haunted. The rangers do quite well at chasing ghost-hunters away, though.
When my kids were younger, (13 & 10) we went to Gettysburg, after a day touring the battlefield, followed by dinner we drove out to the battlefield.
We approached the Devil's den, coming from the Peach Orchard direction. When we got to the Den, we parked, turned off the engine and stood outside and just contemplated the situation.
It was dark, forboding and a definite feeling of gloom was in the air. Lights flickered here and there, the wind did not sound right as the leaves on trees shook in a brief gust.
It took about five minutes for the kids to get creeped out and we were right behind them.
Haunted, maybe.
Eerie was more like it.
I assume this is held on Sept. 17th?
I give speeches while dressed as a CS soldier on the Vicksburg battlefield. I often wonder how many ghost sitings I am responsible for while I am wandering around.
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