It was our annual vacation last week, spring break for our boys and Marsha. We went to Philadelphia and to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was another in our series of history vacations. And enjoyable it was.What do we seek when we go to a place like Gettysburg? What is important about seeing the place, walking over the terrain? The photo is a shot of my 15-year-old Logan charging, a bit too merrily, up the slope toward the momentous pivot of the Gettysburg battlefield, a place called the Bloody Angle, which is now and was then no more than the edge of a small farm field with a low stone wall that is mostly fallen down. The corner in the wall that came to be called the Bloody Angle, upon which I stood to shoot this photograph, is just a couple hundred yards up a shallow slope from the Emmitsburg Road, on which two cars are passing in the distance behind Logan (that’s Marsha walking behind). Close on the right, out of the photo, is the end of the village of Gettysburg, with its many shops and motels, just 300 yards away. In the distance, about 3/4s of a mile off is the monument to the soldiers of Virginia and General Robert E. Lee, which stands at about the center of the Confederate line of 12,000 soldiers who charged the Union defenses on Cemetery Ridge across the intervening crop fields on July 3, 1863 -- famed Pickett’s Charge. We walked the length of the charge twice, once to, once from the Lee momument.
These are difficult questions, ones that hold thousands of thinkers in thrall. Why do we seek to remember? Even, what do we seek to remember?
First, for me, I seek to know the terrain because Gettysburg is so much discussed. Thinkers have long pondered and written about the war that Gettysburg stands at the center of and the battle itself and lately even more to the short speech that played an early role in the ways our nation remembers this battle, Lincoln’s address at the National Cemetery, which is a just a couple hundreds yards in back of the Bloody Angle. One who is an American and a thinker and reader, practically speaking, wants to know a good deal about such an event, for other thinkers have written and keep writing about it in great detail, seeking its meaning, sensing that there is great meaning to it. Knowing the event pays off, unlike some other much-discussed features of our culture. Further, of course, war and battle are compelling and enlightening in general, and since Gettysburg was the site of our nation’s most famous and most discussed battle, it is almost certain that those who study it will find it compelling and enlightening.
But of course, the act of remembering, of trying to know a past event of this kind, has other higher purposes. Trying to know the battlefield better is for me part of an effort to fathom the meaning of the battle, the war, and their aftermath. I hope that by physically standing on the ground that I know so well in my mind from books and two previous visits will somehow deepen or improve upon what I think of the event and to fathom what others think of it in all that complexity and diversity. I sense it strongly that I can just stand in such a place, I can make better sense of what happened there.
So did my visit, my third to Gettysburg, achieve these purposes? I don’t know yet. I expected to be deeply moved, but I felt little. I expected to witness Marsha or my boys being moved, for none of them had been to Gettysburg before. But they didn’t have much to say about what being on the battlefield meant to them and little in their outward behavior suggested what they were thinking or whether they were feeling something profound. But I continue to ponder these things. I don’t want to create artificial reflections, cook up some profound jibber-jabber because I expect profundity and wisdom of myself. I want to be authentic, to describe what is truly happening in my mind and soul as I ponder what happened at Gettysburg as a result of the visit to the site where the battle took place.
Yet despite my lack of feeling, I remain fascinated with Gettysburg, I suppose, obviously, because it is a pivot of that great war, which makes it a great pivot in our national history, which makes it a pivot in world history, even in the history of humankind, which makes what happened at the Bloody Angle a pivot of almost unfathomable moment. Something vast and terrible and wondrous and great in human history turned at that place on the afternoon of Pickett’s Charge to the stone wall, with the weight of all the events leading to the place and the moment pushing behind all those soldiers on both sides. Not that there weren’t other pivots -- and many have been the pivots proposed. This time around, I learned a new one while skimming a book in a Gettysburg book shop: that the battle for Culp’s Hill on Day Two of the battle, Saturday, July 2, 1863, was probably the greater failure, for the Confederacy that is, than the failure at the Bloody Angle the day after. But it seems to me in all my studies of this event that the assault at the Bloody Angle is the most telling axis of the war. But beyond this, for now, I am empty of deep thought and deep feeling, as I have often been when pondering what happened at Gettysburg.
4 comments:
I forgot to mention that Logan, in the photo, is carrying a book in the crook of his right arm as he makes his charge. They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but perhaps a book would not have been much use on that day long ago when Pickett's division set out for Cemetery Ridge. I don't know for sure, but I believe the book is a work of Latin literature -- in the Latin language, just to be clear. Hard to say how the Union soldiers would have reacted to an assault with a book written in Latin on that day. Since many soldiers in desperate straights used rocks as weapons during the battle, they might have thought Logan had lost his rifle but stumbled across a textbook lost in this field by some student of the Lutheran Seminary that was then and is still located very near the Bloody Angle. Perhaps Log himself will enlighten us as to the reading he bore with him that recent day on the battlefield.
Ben, when I worked in Hagerstown, Maryland I visited the site of the Antietam battlefield. This was the site of the bloodiest single day battle in US history. About 23,000 people were killed or wounded on Sept. 17, 1862, including 12,000 in the first few hours in "the cornfield".
This carnage is unimaginable. What motivated these poor kids to rush into certain death? Did they really have an ideological or philosophical issue, or did they simply need the money? For that matter what entices people to fight for "their country" anyway? If nobody donned a uniform or rifle there would be no wars, right? Who would fight them? Wars are a result of politicians convincing the masses that it's in their best interest to fight. It rarely is.
I cannot sanction such ideas, Kev. You’re being much too categorical and simplistic for me in your comments about the causes of war. You’re flying, too, against Honest Abe, who declared a new birth of freedom in the cauldron of violence that the Civil War created and brought about, in part, Sharpsburg (Antietam) and Gettysburg. Perhaps you are right. But I doubt your position strongly and disagree with you almost entirely.
I believe war to be inevitable in a statistical and sociological sense. There will ever arise groups of people for a host of reasons. And there will ever arise conflicts among those groups, mostly becuase of the inevitable nature of grouping. Forevermore, some small percentage of those conflicts will become wars. Forevermore, some few of those wars will become total wars. Forevermore, some few of total wars will become extremely or massively destructive wars in some way or sense. Our chief job should be to keep each kind of war as rare as possible.
A work to check out is "For Cause and Comrade," a brilliant, sobering, and deeply instructive examination of the motives of soldiers in the Civil War, compiled by James MacPherson, the author of the superb history of the era, "Battle Cry of Freedom." Another book to study is Studs Terkel’s "The Good War," which concerns the views of soldiers, mostly American, who fought in the Second World War. Neither book shows many dupes.
But perhaps your raw, coarse position arises from your anger and fear about what has happened in America’s most recent war, the Iraq War of King George IV and His Regent, Richard Cheney. Perhaps your thinking is similar to Michael Moore’s: "The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich." I can’t blame you for thinking nearly every war is a deception in such circumstances, if we understand those circumstances rightly -- which is much in dispute in our society and in my own mind.
But consider United 93, the film on the 9-11 plane that was forced down by plucky, courageous passengers. Do I agree with you in thinking the passengers were members of the ignorant masses duped by their government into killing those suicide-hijack-terrorists by crashing their plane into a Pennsylvania field, which was an act of war in some sense by non-soldiers? I don’t agree that this was a case of the masses following a government, though perhaps it could be construed as such by some tedious, tortuous argument.
Ben, I guess what I was alluding to was that if your average citizen refused to go along with the government when they declare war, then there would be no wars. Politicians start wars but soldiers fight them. If no one fought then the politicians would just be talking nonsense.
The tragedy is too many people believe in the power fo the state and therefore submit themselves to the desires ot the state. But why? I believe it is because people don't have enough faith in themselves to make the right decisions. They rely on governments, their "leaders", to make decisions for them.
Maybe this was true for some leaders such as Gengis Khan or Hannibal, but for the most part we should ignore our leaders--indeed we should resist them if they are morally wrong--and go about our business.
If enough Germans did this in 1933 WWII may not have happened.
You imply that wars are inevitable. I disagree. If people were willing to stand up for what is right and refuse to fight (think Vietnam) then far fewer conflicts would even get started.
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