A visit to Gettysburg is an eloquent reminder of the devastating battle that turned the tide of the Civil War.
By ROBERT N. JENKINS
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 18, 2001
GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- Before it happened -- the overwhelming violence, the cacophony of the guns, the screams of thousands of wounded men and of thousands of wounded horses, the shouts of encouragement and of defiance -- before all this, the sum of it could not have been imagined.
Now, it can only be imagined, for 138 years have passed, and now warfare destroys in other ways.
But in the first three days of July 1863 there was, of course, a general understanding of warfare. For years, the easiest way to win a battle was to fire cannons at the other fellows.
Having thus killed some of them and frightened some of them and treated all of them to a taste of hell, you would stride toward the survivors with your single-shot rifle and, when close enough, you would aim and fire. Then you would reload and march forward some more.
But the other fellow likely had cannons, too, at least some of them identical to yours. And he had been shooting his cannons at you. And his rifle was pretty much equal to yours, so when you were in range to shoot him, you were in range to be shot.
Those were the tactics during the miserably hot days on the rolling farmland and boulder-strewn hills outside Gettysburg. That was how Gen. Robert E. Lee planned to destroy the Union force assigned to defend Washington. Thus, he thought he could force Abraham Lincoln to halt the fighting and allow the Confederate States of America to truly secede.
To that end, on those three days there were more cannons touched off, more rifles fired and more dying than at any time before or since on this continent.
Today, nearly 6,000 acres of battleground that roughly surrounds this south-central Pennsylvania town and some privately held farms is a National Military Park. About 1.8-million people come annually to view the croplands, the boulder-studded hills, the tree lines and the gentle ridges of land that defined 1863's killing fields.
Across this area, about 170,000 soldiers fought. Historians debate the final casualty toll because of uncertainty about wounds that proved mortal long after the fighting. But between 32,700 and 34,560 soldiers -- Americans all -- were killed or wounded. Another 18,200 were declared missing or captured.
The fighting pretty much ended the afternoon of July 3 with the Confederate retreat from Pickett's Charge -- a misnomer, for Maj. Gen. George Pickett was but one of three equal commanders ordering his men to march a mile across open ground toward the Union stronghold.
Pickett was following the orders of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet. He in turn was reluctantly carrying out the directive of an honored friend but with whom he then could not have more strongly disagreed: Gen. Robert E. Lee.
As commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee moved more than 75,000 men and 275 cannons -- the bulk of the Confederacy's forces -- north, to capture the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg. By moving the major warfare out of the beleaguered southern states and by audaciously seizing a seat of government, Lee thought he could force Lincoln to order a halt to the fighting.
Fate, of course, intervened.
Union troops were mirroring Lee's northward march. On the morning of July 1, advance forces of Lee's column moved east from the cover of the Blue Ridge Mountains to scavenge food and supplies from around a crossroads town that was just 10 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line: Gettysburg.
The farming town of about 2,500 was at the intersection of highways linking Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Harrisburg to Washington, D.C., 79 miles away.
The Confederate troops were halted by rifle fire from a small force of Union cavalry hurriedly positioned along a lightly wooded ridge just outside town. Though the southerners brought up more troops, the northerners at first held up well. Indeed, their commander, Maj. Gen. John Reynolds, sent a message to the leader of the Union forces, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade:
"The enemy is advancing in force. I will fight him inch by inch . . ."
Reynolds was shot dead shortly after writing this.
The Confederates forced the outnumbered Union troops east, back through town, where thousands were captured.
More than 200 structures from the period still stand. The bullet-pocked bricks and occasional cannon shell still visible in a wall show contemporary visitors the ferocity of the fighting.
But the Southerners, instead of securing their victory, ceased their advance and thus gave their foes an advantage that ultimately would provide the winning edge.
The slow retreat by the northerners allowed reinforcements to take possession of two low hills on the southeast edge of the town, Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill, and then dug in along the adjacent Cemetery Ridge. This gentle rise runs south to rocky hills named Little Round Top and Big Round Top.
On the protected side of this ridge, Meade's forces advanced northward. He assembled about 109,000 men -- about 97,000 of them foot soldiers and artillery troops -- and 356 cannons.
Now the Union held the high ground, valuable in a battle because of the added difficulty for attacking forces who had to climb uphill while also being more exposed than were the defenders.
The general shape of the Union line resembled the capital letter J, but it is more often referred to as the fishhook. The sharp end of the hook curved along and around Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill, at the northern end of the line. The shank, or straight part, of the fishhook flowed south along Cemetery Ridge, to Little Round Top.
The Confederate forces were mostly opposite the Yankees to the west, in woods just behind Seminary Ridge. About a mile of open fields and fruit trees separated the forces.
Thus, immediately south of Gettysburg massed a significant percentage of the nation's future, young men who would have rather been walking behind a plow, bending wood into wagon wheels, making shoes, tending textile looms, hauling in fish nets, milking cows.
Instead, they were about to slaughter each other.
The Civil War is said to be the most written-about event in human history. One of the most readable works on Gettysburg is Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. The 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner, written by the onetime St. Petersburg policeman, was made into a four-hour film, Gettysburg; it often airs on cable TV.
The book's and film's personification of the real-life participants present both the war's major principles and this battle's successes and failures. With this sort of background, sightseers can appreciate what it means to walk the grassy fields, drive along the opposing ridgelines, observe the placement of more than 300 cannons and climb the hills. In these places you can stand where the two armies gathered and fought.
Typical of the quiet sites where visitors must bring their imagination is Little Round Top, at the "eye" of the fishhook. Markers now define where various Union troops were stationed, as hundreds of other markers are in place representing other units throughout the battlefields.
On Little Round Top, busloads of schoolchildren and sightseers scramble among the boulders and wander the woods, looking down to the places from which Confederate troops once charged again and again.
Maybe the visitor can draw on childhood memories of playing cowboys and Indians, or king of the hill, to picture the men of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry, nearly out of ammunition, making a bayonet charge downhill against the 15th Alabama.
But nothing less than combat itself can create the images of what happened in the croplands a few hundred yards in front of Little Round Top. There, in battles known for their locations in the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield, the two sides butchered each other.
Where tourists now wander, control of the Wheatfield changed hands six times in two hours. More than 6,000 men were killed, wounded or captured.
So many wounded soldiers dragged themselves to a narrow creek a few hundred yards away to drink or to wash their wounds that it was nicknamed Bloody Run. Close to the foot of the two Round Tops, soldiers were pinned down and picked off. It became known as the Slaughter Pen.
There also were prolonged battles for the hills at the opposite end of the fishhook. But the decisive battle was yet to come.
Despite heavy losses and no substantial victories on July 2, Gen. Lee did not want to abandon the battlefield. He was convinced that the attacks on both ends of the Union line must have forced Meade to reinforce the ends by taking troops from the middle of the fishhook, thus weakening its center.
Lee's plan of battle for July 3 was simple: He had about 150 cannon in position atop Seminary Ridge and an estimated 12,000 soldiers massed behind them.
At 1 p.m. on the third day, his artillery began to fire toward the troops and cannons in the middle of the 3-mile-long fishhook. The Union cannons returned fire, an artillery duel that lasted until 3 p.m.
When the Union guns stopped firing, Lee presumed enough of them had been destroyed that his soldiers could take the northerners. He told Longstreet, who did not share Lee's optimism, to have the men advance, an order passed on to Pickett and two other generals.
We can stand now by the cannons atop Seminary Ridge and perhaps conjure up an image of 4,000 Confederate soldiers stepping from behind us and marching across the grass toward the Union forces atop Cemetery Ridge, a mile away. But we then need to imagine another row of 4,000 passing us and the cannon, followed by a third row of 4,000.
These men strode across the undulating ground. As the land dipped and rose, so, too, did their bodies disappear from view only to rise again.
Their goal was a grove of trees roughly in the center of the fishhook. If the Confederates could break through there, they could turn to either side and slice up Meade's Army of the Potomac. And then the Rebels could move unhindered to Washington.
But atop the slow rise that is Cemetery Ridge, about 7,000 Union soldiers were positioned, many behind a wall of rocks less than 2 feet high.
And just behind them were the cannons that had not been destroyed by the two-hour bombardment. When the Rebels got within about 150 yards of that stone wall, the Union cannons were touched off again. They fired tin cans filled with metal spheres about a half-inch across -- the equivalent of a huge shotgun shell.
Bodies and limbs were blasted through the air, back on to the Confederate soldiers. Nonetheless, they kept coming. From behind the stone wall that is still in place, the Yankees fired into the Confederates, walking, now running, across the open ground.
Some of the Rebels breached that stone wall, but too few to seize the position. Within an hour of Longstreet ordering the assault by 12,000 soldiers, about 8,000 of them were dead or wounded, including most of the senior officers who set off at the front of their troops. Those soldiers who could retreated to Seminary Ridge.
Among them was Lt. John T. James of the 11th Virginia Infantry. Eight days after Pickett's Charge, James wrote to his family to explain what had happened and why. He wrote:
"We gained nothing but glory, and lost our bravest men."
The farthest spot on Cemetery Ridge that the Southerners reached is now marked by a memorial tablet declaring this "The High Water Mark of the Confederacy."
The designation is apt. In three days Lee's Army of Northern Virginia suffered 2,396 killed, 11,882 wounded and 12,867 captured or missing. Although the Confederacy would fight for 21 more months, it would never recover from those three days outside a Pennsylvania crossroads village.
Untold numbers of the wounded were not moved from the fields of fire, so they died of their injuries where they fell. Many of the dead were buried in shallow graves, at night, after the firefights had died down. And many of the dead were abandoned as their comrades pulled back to other positions.
To realize that much of this velvety farmland was once dyed red with blood, that bodies left here in the summer sun exploded from the expanding gases of deterioration, can make a visit to the National Military Park an emotional experience.
But the battlefields are not the whole story.
After the two armies headed south, the citizens of Gettysburg tried to deal with the aftermath: their farms, fences and livestock decimated, homes hit by rifle and cannon fire. And thousands of wounded and dead to be taken care of.
Pennsylvania Gov. Andre Curtin, surveying the area, was staggered by the devastation as well as the inept care of the dead; heavy rains beginning the day after the battles -- July 4, 1863 -- had even uncovered some of the shallow graves.
Curtin gathered funds from other Northern states to create a proper cemetery. Still, 5 1/2 months after the battle ended, on the date of the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery, only one-third of the victims had been re-interred. The Confederate dead were not recovered from their battlefield graves until the 1870s, when the soldiers' remains were shipped to their home states.
On Nov. 19, 1863 -- 138 years ago Monday -- a crowd estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000 gathered next to the city's civilian cemetery to watch the dedication. The primary speaker was former Massachusetts Gov. Edward Everett. He spoke extemporaneously for about two hours.
A band played briefly. Then a tall figure dressed in black stood to offer "a few appropriate remarks" as requested by his host, a prominent Gettysburg lawyer. And so Abraham Lincoln uttered a 272-word speech that is considered the most important in our nation's history.
With his "Gettysburg Address," the President sought to interpret the meaning not just of the dreadful battle that had occurred here but of the entire war.
He reminded his listeners, and those who later read the speech in the day's newspapers, why the United States had been created, why it needed to be preserved, why the sacrifices here and elsewhere had to be made and also had to be cherished. Lincoln said:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is, rather, for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The National Cemetery at Gettysburg holds 3,512 bodies of Union soldiers, most of them killed in the three-day battle. Among them are 979 noted only by numbers on ground-level markers, for they are unknown as to their names or military units.