War never left Gettysburg
150 years later, battle’s bloody imprint survives in Pa. town
GETTYSBURG, PA. The battlefield is never totally at rest.
It does quiet to the sounds of chirping birds and distant cars when the tourists and busloads of boisterous schoolchildren leave, and dusk comes gently to quaint-sounding places such as Little Round Top, The Peach Orchard and the Wheat Field.
But 150 years ago this July 1-3, this rocky, gentle roll of Pennsylvania hills went overnight from “this peaceful place to a terror that is unimaginable,” Ken Burns says.
The filmmaker’s words resonate in an age of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing. As Gettysburg on June 28 begins 10 days of 150thanniversary commemorations, these fields won’t rest as long as people like the Clarks of Vermont keep coming.
Erwin, 80, Janet, 75, and their son, Bradley, 46, came here on an overcast spring morning to see where an ancestor — a 21-year-old from Addison, Vt. — died July 3, 1863. He passed in the darkness before dawn, one of the first casualties of the battle’s last day, a day when the seemingly invincible Robert E. Lee reached too far and events turned inexorably in favor of preserving a union of North and South.
Four months after the battle, in an address schoolchildren around the world still study, Abraham Lincoln said a “new birth of freedom” had been consecrated by “the last full measure of devotion” of the roughly 8,000 Americans who died here.
One such measure took place near Culp’s Hill, a tree-covered slope where the savagery over those three sultry July days still defies compre-
hension. It was there where Bradley Clark’s great-great-great uncle, Pvt. Myron A. Clark of Company I, of the 14th Vermont, had fallen. His diary led them here.
“He looked so young,” says Bradley Clark, referring to a picture of the young soldier his family found tucked in the diary. “He looked like an Addison farm boy.”
At least 46,000 on both sides were left dead, wounded or missing. Historians still probe the decisions made here, and leadership institutes teach the lessons of the calls made by commanders. For all of them, and for the Clarks and an estimated 3 million to 4 million other tourists expected to visit this year, Gettysburg will always remain a place of what-ifs.
‘IT ALMOST DEFIES ANALYSIS’
The population of Gettysburg is roughly three times larger today than the 2,400 or so here when 100,000 bluecoats under Gen. George Meade and 70,000 Confederates under Gen. Lee fought. Stores selling battlefield memorabilia and cheap trinkets compete with more than 1,300 solemn monuments and markers in the Gettysburg National Military Park and the more than 5,000 buried in the Soldiers National Cemetery nearby.
The anniversary commemoration this year will include battle re-enactments, guided tours and special National Park Service ranger programs, and other related events.
The festivities at Gettysburg are a featured midpoint of four years of Civil War anniversaries across the country. Gettysburg stands above them all, not only for the neverending debate over whether it alone was the turning point of the war but also because of the scale of armies, the varied landscape on which they clashed, the leaders who inspired or failed, and the aftermath that turned a bustling county seat into a collage of death, anguish and mercy.
“The size of it is so overwhelming it almost defies analysis and understanding,” says Harold Holzer, a leading scholar on Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era.
“It is like someone created this set for a battle that had everything: rocks, open fields, hills, a cemetery with all its portent of death, a seminary, a college — the future and the past,” says Holzer, who consulted on Stephen Spielberg ’s Lincoln. “It is like a heaven- or hell-sent movie set.”
‘STORY OF HOPE’ EMERGES
For many who live here or take pilgrimages here, the memories are more intimate and extend beyond the battlefield. Gettysburg ’s Mayor William Troxell, 86, met Gettysburg veterans on the 75th anniversary in 1938. They initially separated the old veterans, South and North, but by the end of that commemoration, they shook hands across the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge where the charge of Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s Confederates ultimately failed.
Troxell, who sports a picture of himself at age 11 with a Confederate veteran, said that although historians often focus on the clashing armies, people should also remember what war leaves behind. About 20,000 wounded men were in and around the town in the days and weeks after the battle. Houses became hospitals, and the stench of dead men and horses lingered on the battlefield as armies of mercy descended upon Gettysburg after the fighters left.
“The people that lived (in Gettysburg) at that time paid a greater sacrifice for the nation than any other small town has been asked to do,” Troxell says. “Until (outside aid) ar- rived, citizens were on their own.”
More than a decade ago, John Wega quit his job as a national sales manager for a start-up biotechnology company, and he and his wife, Susan, moved their four children to Gettysburg to start a museum and ministry to the Christian Commission. That organization enlisted men and women to trail Civil War armies while ministering to spiritual and physical needs. After Gettysburg, dozens stayed to help attend to the wounded, bury the dead, and feed doctors, nurses and burial parties.
“It provided a story of hope in a hopeless situation,” Wega says. Historians, he says, often focus on the grisly details of battle, “and it can be depressing. In that backdrop, if you can provide a story of hope ... that is a story worth telling.”
That’s why the commemoration at Gettysburg will go much deeper than the battle.
“We are dedicated to telling not just the story of the fighting, which is an incredibly compelling story, and there are so many what-ifs,” says Catherine Lawhon, the National Park Service’s spokeswoman at Gettysburg. “But there is an important story of the aftermath and the recovery and what happens when the armies leave Gettysburg, and that kind of culminates with the Gettysburg Address.”
Some families returned to destroyed homes and farms, and “some of them never recover.”
DEATH OF ‘A GOOD BOY’
Pvt. Clark’s family can’t help but have a lingering grief.
They feel like they know their Myron through the richly detailed diary he left, which Janet Clark transcribed and is viewable online. His last detailed entry was on July 1 when he told about changing into a fresh shirt, throwing away the old one to lighten his load, and joining the march to Gettysburg with only a pup tent and extra pair of socks to carry.
The final words in the diary came from an unnamed captain, who scribbled that a 12-pound cannonball took off the back of Myron Clark’s head near dawn on July 3, 10 hours before Pickett’s Charge would reap horrible carnage on another part of the battlefield and turn Gettysburg into a victory for the Union army.
Myron was company clerk, “a good boy and a good soldier,” the captain wrote. “The whole Co. (company) mourn his loss & Especially his Capt.” Then, finally: “Such are the fortunes of war. And they are deplorable.”
On the drive back to Addison after visiting the battlefield, Bradley Clark says he and his parents talked about how this young man must have felt in his last hours and how “a whole other branch of the family would have been in our town had he not been killed.”
That is the essence of Gettysburg, a place remembered not only in the movements of armies, but in what-if moments, big and small.
What if Lee had not added an “if practicable” to his orders to Confederate Gen. Richard Ewell to take Cemetery Hill on July 1, and Ewell had pushed his tired men to take barely defended high ground that could have turned the battle for the Confederates on its first day?
What if Joshua Chamberlain of the 7th Maine had not convinced 116 men under arrest for desertion to join his defense of Little Round Top and then, out of ammunition, persuade his men to fix bayonets and charge down the hill to save the Union’s left flank?
What if Lee, so confident in an army that had rarely failed him, had listened to subordinates and decided against the suicidal Pickett’s Charge, saving his army to fight another day on a more favorable northern field?
“All of those tantalizing, open questions are what makes it so fascinating,” says Holzer, whose new book, The Civil War in 50 Objects, includes accounts of two Gettysburg combatants — one who died and one who survived.
Confederate Brig. Gen. Paul Semmes, a Georgian, was mortally wounded on the second day of the battle in a charge below Little Round Top. As Holzer writes, Semmes lingered for eight days before dying, writing his wife a loving letter in which he declared: “My brigade suffered severely and behaved well.”
On the Union side, Lt. Col. William H. Paine of the 4th Wisconsin was a mapmaker who witnessed Pickett’s 12,000 men march into point-blank artillery grape shot and rifle fire. Paine’s footlocker, discovered after the war, contained his vivid account of the charge and of walking across the field thereafter.”
“It was the most fearfully magnificent scene imaginable,” he wrote.
Burns cautions that the what-if scenarios can be a “great minefield for all of us, both historians and nonhistorians,” that can distort history and “undercut the human beings that were at the heart of this struggle.” The reality of what happened here is its power, he says.