Gettysburg, and Achieving Our Country

History, historic memory, and treason's flaunting rag.

(Recommended Listening: Judy Garland, The Battle Hymn of the Republic)

Like a book, every great battle has its particular characters, occurrences, and narrative rhythm. In the aftermath, both while the corpses are still warm on the field and centuries later at academic conferences, these features are remembered, debated, immortalized. Military history in particular, ever since ancient times, is full of these features – Caesar building two walls around Alesia, the Norman false retreat at Hastings, Napoleon committing the Guard at Waterloo.¹ The extent of the depth of inquiry can often be mindboggling – there are entire historiographical debates about individual units of mere dozens of men, by whose actions great battles were decided. They become part of myths, particularly national myths, to the extent of common knowledge – even today, if one mentions the phrase “Pickett’s Charge,” there are those who would never describe themselves as a historian or even a history buff who will have opinions on what Lee should have or shouldn’t have done on that fateful day 160 years ago today.

This mindset can often lead to bad history, even among academics who probably should know better. But who can resist it? Even speaking as a self-professed fan of the Annales school, reading Plutarch and Polybius describe the deeds of great men can often be far more interesting than analysis of tax records. Much history, particularly ancient and popular history, is written as a narrative, with its attendant characteristics – an inciting incident, a slow rise in tension, characters pursuing their motivations, the climax, and the resolution. Humans instinctually crave narrative, to place the happenings of the world in a proper order, sequence, and pattern. It is why Caesar and Vercingetorix, Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror, Napoleon and Wellington, will always be more powerful, more resonant, than academic history.

Gettysburg was the first battlefield I ever visited and truly appreciated. My father, at the time still in the military, had been sent to do a post-graduate program, part of which included a trip to Gettysburg. He brought me along, and every member of the program (and me, who could not have been more than 15 or 16) was given a “character,” an officer in the battle, from Lee and Meade down to the level of brigade and regiment, to research and present on at various parts of the battlefield tour. So, at Little Round Top, I stood on a low stone wall and spoke to the assembled group, a mix of graduate students and military officers, about how I, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20^th Maine, had saved the Union on June 2, 1863. It was great fun.

We walked around the battlefield, making a pilgrimage to the various relics of the battle – the rocks of the Devil’s Den, the wheatfield where Sickles committed the III Corps against all reason, inadvertently (or not) delaying Longstreet’s attack further down the Union left. Cemetery Ridge, where the Union troops chanted “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” as Lee made the same mistake Burnside had at that battle, where Pickett and Pettigrew and Armistead were broken on Hunt’s guns, the Angle by the famous copse of trees where Cushing’s battery and the 69^th Pennsylvania refused to retreat even as the line briefly broke around them.

I do feel obligated to tell you that recent scholarship has cast doubt on the idea that the famous copse was really the visual landmark for the Confederates (it was too small to be visible from much of the field in 1863). I also feel obligated to say that even if the 20^th Maine and the other remnants of Col. Strong Vincent’s - who, along with Patrick O’Rourke, died in the battle, unlike Chamberlain, who would become a general, Governor of Maine and a Medal of Honor recipient and thus the focus of post-war attention - had his brigade been overwhelmed by the Texans and Alabamans who ascended the hill, that they could not have easily mounted guns to enfilade the Union lines. Indeed, had the Union been forced to retreat from Little Round Top, it is doubtful the Confederacy could have kept it, as Sedgwick’s VI Corps, fresh and unbloodied, were within a mile and easily outnumbered the bloodied, tired Confederates who would have taken the hill.

I remember reading this at the time, and having a crisis of accuracy. Aside from my budding autistic interest in history, I was desperate for the approval of everyone else there, to be seen as “smart for my age” despite being much younger than anyone else. When I brought my concerns to my father, he gave a rather appropriate answer, all said – “You’re playing a character. If Chamberlain thought he saved the Union, then you just have to play it up as he would.”

I doubt he intended more than to just assuage my nerves, but he made an important point about how historical – and, particularly, battlefield memory works. It is the role of tiresome, nitpicking historians like me to come around after the fact, with our revisionism and our “well, actuallys.” It is the role of a good historian to poke holes in historical myths, particularly nationalist ones – the ongoing historical debates in Germany over the “clean Wehrmacht” myth for instance, or, closer to the topic at hand, the Lost Cause.

But the thing is – that doesn’t make a very compelling story. I think I find as much enjoyment in said nitpicking, in the careful academic work of history, as anyone else. But I am human, and narrative is always more powerful than that.

There are few battles in American history which have such a place in historical memory as Gettysburg does. The only ones which can be said to come close are Lexington and Concord, and perhaps D-Day and Pearl Harbor (if one can call that a battle). For the Lost Causer, it (and particularly Pickett’s Charge) is the High Water Mark of the Confederacy (there is a monument of that very name at the battlefield today), that moment “for every Southern boy fourteen years old,” as Faulkner says, when:

“... it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.” (Intruder in the Dust, 1948)²

It is also, necessarily, the Gethsemane where the Judas Longstreet plunges the dagger into the Christ Lee’s back. It is the ultimate example in their Dolchstoßlegende, when the traitor Longstreet (who would, further revealing his perfidy, become a Black Republican and lead a Black militia against honorable white men redeeming their government after the late unpleasantness), who was always opposed to the attack, fails Lee. He had argued against the assault, impugning the honor of 15,000 brave Southrons by saying that no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle could have taken Cemetery Ridge. He did not send orders to Pickett’s division to muster for the assault until early afternoon (a misinterpretation of Lee’s orders – most likely undeliberate, unless one is looking to preserve the reputation of Lee as the greatest military mind in history from one of the most disastrous tactical miscalculations in the history of warfare). It was Longstreet’s corps which Pickett belonged to, and Longstreet who was in overall command. And it was Longstreet who had so sluggishly and disjointedly attacked the Union left the day before, with Union colonels and generals able to plug gaps in the line just in the nick of time to prevent a breakthrough.

We have already discussed part of the counterpoint – the Union veneration of the battle. Chamberlain won himself lasting glory by his heroics, yes, but also by being the most senior man to survive Little Round Top. There is, I think, one perspective which I personally associate with the American view of Gettysburg more than any other. I am familiar with it because of the writer @AngryStaffOfficer (who wrote a wonderful thread of the battle of Gettysburg, in real time, which I highly recommend reading today). Lt. Frank Haskell, who was present for Pickett’s Charge on the third day, wrote these lines about when the attack began:

None on that crest now need be told that the enemy is advancing…The trefoil flags, colors of the brigades and divisions moved to their places in rear; but along the lines in front the grand old ensign that first waved in battle at Saratoga in 1777, and which these people coming would rob of half its stars, stood up, and the west wind kissed it as the sergeants sloped its lance towards the enemy. I believe that not one above whom it then waved but blessed his God that he was loyal to it, and whose heart did not swell with pride towards it, as the emblem of the Republic before that treason’s flaunting rag in front.

Yet the thing which most Americans most associate with Gettysburg is not even the battle itself, but the most famous speech in American history, given to dedicate a cemetery for the dead four months after the battle itself. It is worth quoting full on the anniversary of the battle:

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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not 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 true resonance of Gettysburg remains, for the true American uninterested in defending traitorous slavers, as the site where the best summation of American ideals was delivered. Is it tempting, as a historian, to nitpick it to death? Yes. Is that often a worthy profession and goal? Yes, although I am a bit biased on that question. Am I still moved, despite all my justified cynicism about those promises and ideals, compared to the gritty reality? Yes. It is the reason I always take a moment in the first few days of July to remember Gettysburg, not only because of its personal meaning, but because of its meaning for my country.

The narrative is powerful, and no amount of nitpicking academia can fully ruin it for me. Neither can I fully endorse it in good conscience, even (perhaps especially) now. This is a fact with enormous potential for both good and bad, as all myths and narratives are. But I would hazard a guess that American civic nationalism, if we are to have a nationalism (and despite my wishes to the contrary, it seems that the nation-state is a cockroach-like model of human society), is one of the least evil. The ideas expressed by Lincoln – that there must be a new birth of freedom in this country, that government must be of the people, by the people, and for the people - are certainly a better starting place for a truly just society than anything professed by the men who died so piteously, enfiladed by Hunt’s guns, 160 years ago today. God willing, someday we might achieve our country and its ideals. 

(Title Image Credit: Pickett's Charge from a position on the Confederate line looking toward the Union lines, Ziegler's Grove on the left, clump of trees on right by Edwin Forbes)

1. I have been reading Les Miserables this year, one chapter a day, via Les Mis Letters. Hugo dedicates an entire book (Volume II, Book I), 19 chapters of writing, to Waterloo. This is only somewhat relevant to the plot of the Thernardier and Marius Pontmercy. Hugo discusses Napoleon vs Wellington as destined pairs, he discusses Cambronne, he discusses Waterloo as a defeat for France (certainly) and for the values of the Revolution (perhaps not) in between discussions of how, even in his time, the battlefield had been changed from its original layout. I highly recommend reading all of Les Mis, but the book on Waterloo is fairly short and well-worth a read if you are at all interested in Napoleon or European history.

2. Whether intentionally or not, Faulkner’s invocation of 1492 - an inherently colonial metaphor - is very apropos for an army which had kidnapped free Blacks during its advance into Pennsylvania and sold them down South into slavery, just as Columbus kidnapped many Taino and sent them to Spain.