Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg Read online

  ALSO IN THE CROWN JOURNEYS SERIES

  Land's End, by Michael Cunningham

  After the Dance, by Edwidge Danticat

  City of the Soul, by William Murray

  Washington Schlepped Here, by Christopher Buckley

  ALSO BY JAMES M. MCPHERSON

  Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution

  Battle Chronicles of the Civil War

  Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

  Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (Pivotal Moments in American History)

  Days of Destiny: Crossroads in American History

  Drawn with the Sword: Reflections of the American Civil War

  Fields of Fury: The American Civil War

  For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War

  Gettysburg: The Paintings of Mort Kunstler

  Is Blood Thicker Than Water? Crises of Nationalism in the Modern World

  Lamson of the Gettysburg: The Civil War Letters of Lieutenant Roswell H. Lamson, U. S. Navy

  Marching Toward Freedom: Blacks in the Civil War 1861-1865

  The Negro's Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union

  Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction

  The Abolitionist Legacy

  The American Heritage New History of the Civil War

  The Struggle for Equality

  To the Best of My Ability: The American Presidents

  We Cannot Escape History: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope of Earth

  What They Foughtfor 1861-1865

  Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand

  To James McPherson Long

  May he too befriend

  Mr. Lincoln

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  MAP FOR JULY I

  Day One: July i, 4 863

  MAP FOR JULY 2

  Day Two: July 2, 1863

  MAP FOR JULY 3

  Day Three: July 3, 1863

  EPILOGUE

  PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIER'S CEMETERY IN GETTYSBURG, NOVEMBER 19, 1863

  PROLOGUE

  IN HIS ADDRESS at the dedication of the cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln acknowledged that “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 power to add or detract.”

  More than any other place in the United States, this battlefield is indeed hallowed ground. Perhaps no word in the American language has greater historical resonance than Gettysburg. For some people Lexington and Concord, or Bunker Hill, or Yorktown, or Omaha Beach would be close rivals. But more Americans visit Gettysburg each year than any of these other battlefields—perhaps than all of them combined.

  And Gettysburg resonates far beyond these shores. At least sixty thousand foreigners are among the nearly two million annual visitors to the battlefield. In 1851 the British historian Sir Edward Creasy wrote a famous book titled Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. The last of the fifteen was Waterloo, fought in 1815. After the American Civil War, Creasy published a new edition with a sixteenth decisive battle—Gettysburg.

  During the bicentennial commemorations of the American Revolution in 1976, a delegation of historians from the Soviet Union visited the United States as a goodwill gesture, to take part in these events. A colleague of mine on the history faculty at Princeton University was one of their hosts. When they arrived, he asked them which historic sites they wanted to visit first—perhaps Independence Hall in Philadelphia, or maybe Williamsburg and Yorktown in Virginia, or Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. But their answer was none of these. They wanted to go first to Gettysburg.

  Why Gettysburg? asked my astonished colleague. It had nothing to do with the American Revolution. To the contrary, replied the Russians; it had everything to do with the Revolution. In Lincoln's words, it ensured that the nation founded in 1776 would not “perish from the earth.” These Soviet historians may have been more familiar with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address than was my colleague. They knew that the famous opening words of that address—”Four score and seven years ago”—referred to the founding of the United States in 1776, and that Gettysburg was the battlefield on which thousands gave the last full measure of devotion that the nation might live. These Russians also wanted to see Gettysburg first because they compared it to their battle of Stalingrad in World War II—it was the costliest battle in America's own Great Patriotic War that turned the tide toward ultimate victory.

  In 1896 the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that has stood for more than a century as a landmark in the struggle for historic preservation of hallowed ground. Not surprisingly that decision grew out of events surrounding the recent creation of Gettysburg National Military Park. The Gettysburg Electric Railway Company had built a trolley line over the southern part of the battlefield to carry tourists to Devil's Den and the Round Tops. The park wanted to buy the land and restore it to its 1863 appearance, which of course would mean removal of the trolley line. The company refused to sell. The government began proceedings to seize the land under the power of eminent domain. The case went to the Supreme Court, where the government argued that “the ground whereon great conflicts have taken place, especially those where great interests or principles were at stake, becomes at once of so much public interest that its preservation is essentially a matter of public concern.” Nowhere were such great principles at stake more than at Gettysburg, which embodied “the national idea and the principle of the indissolubility of the Union.”

  The Court agreed. The justices ruled unanimously that Gettysburg was vested with such importance for the fate of the United States that the government had the right to “take possession of the field of battle, in the name and for the benefit of all the citizens of the country.… Such a use seems… so closely connected with the welfare of the republic itself as to be within the powers granted Congress by the Constitution for the purpose of protecting and preserving the whole country.”

  The battle of Gettysburg was an event without equal in its connection “with the welfare of the republic itself,” as the Court put it. But what is Gettysburg as a place? It is a battlefield of about ten square miles (five miles from north to south and two miles from east to west, not counting East Cavalry Field) surrounding a county-seat town of about eight thousand people today, 2,400 at the time of the battle in 1863. It is located seventy-five miles north of Washington, 115 miles west of Philadelphia, and only eight miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, which forms the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. From the town of Gettysburg a dozen historic (and modern) roads radiate to every point of the compass—a major reason why a great battle was fought there, for the road network enabled the armies to concentrate there quickly after the opening clashes.

  Although it is the home of Gettysburg College and of a Lutheran theological seminary, the main business of Gettysburg today is tourism. Most of those nearly two million visitors to the battlefield spend money in town. Many tourist services flourish, from restaurants and motels to shops selling every kind of trinket and relic, from “ghost tours” and a wax museum to bookstores and picture galleries. Some of these businesses are cheek by jowl with the National Military Park, which includes more than four thousand acres on which most of the fighting took place during those first three days of July 1863.

  No tourists came to Gettysburg before that time. It was then a market town for a large and prosperous agricultural hinterland. The area was a famous fruitgrowing region; no fewer than thirty-eight orchards
existed on what became the battlefield. All of them are gone today except part of the famous Peach Orchard where the Confederates broke Dan Sickles's line on July 2, plus two ornamental fruit orchards on Cemetery Hill and at the site of the Bliss farm, across which some of the Pickett-Pettigrew attackers marched on July 3. The Park Service has long-term plans to plant replica orchards where they existed in 1863—but don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.

  I have lost count of the number of times I have been to Gettysburg. I have toured the battlefield by car, by bus, on a bicycle, and on foot. Over the past twenty years I have taken Princeton students, alumni, friends, and miscellaneous groups on at least two dozen tours of the battlefield. I have made so many visits to the college and town, as well as the battlefield, that Gettysburg has become almost a second home. I honestly believe that if I were blindfolded and winched down from a helicopter to any spot on the battlefield on a moonlit night, I could remove the blindfold and identify my surroundings within minutes.

  I would not have known where I was on many parts of the battlefield in 1863, however. Not only did all those orchards exist then, but there are also some six hundred acres of woods today that were cleared then, and about 150 acres of cleared land today that were wooded in 1863. Another six hundred acres of woods that existed in the same places then as now were woodlots in 1863, where farmers harvested dead trees and some live ones for fuel and fencing. They also allowed livestock to graze in some of these wood-lots, which kept them free from undergrowth. Many of the woodlots were therefore open and parklike in 1863, enabling troops to move through and fight in them where saplings and undergrowth today would make such activities impossible.

  The Park Service plans to remove 150 acres of woods that did not exist in 1863, to reforest fifty acres (plus the orchards) where woods did exist in 1863, and to cull some trees from the six hundred acres of wood-lots. When they have done so, it will be easier to see and understand the lines of sight, approach, and combat that existed in 1863 (though the culled woodlots will soon grow up in brush and saplings again in the absence of grazing livestock, for which the Park Service has no plans). Until (and even after) this cutting and culling happens, however, the first thing a tour guide must tell listeners is to imagine a cleared field or a parklike woodlot where there are thick woods today, or imagine an orchard or a grove where there are none today. Such a feat of imagination is not always easy.

  What brought those 165,000 soldiers—75,000 Confederate, 90,000 Union—to Gettysburg during the first three days of July 1863? Why did they lock themselves in such a deathgrip across these once bucolic fields until 11,000 of them were killed and mortally wounded, another 29,000 were wounded and survived, and about 10,000 were “missing”—mostly captured. By way of comparison, those 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg—27,000 Confederate,∗ 23,000 Union-were almost ten times the number of American casualties on D-Day, June 6, 1944. What was accomplished by all of this carnage? Join me for a walk on this hallowed ground, where we will try to answer these questions.

  ∗Because of incomplete records, the number of Confederate casualties at Gettysburg is an estimate. Such estimates range from 23,000 to 28,000.

  Day One: July 1, 1863

  WE'LL BEGIN OUR tour three miles north-west of the Gettysburg town square, at the intersection of Knoxlyn Road and U.S. Route 30, the historic Chambersburg Pike. Here, on the morning of July 1, were posted the outlying pickets of the Eighth Illinois Cavalry. As the sun burned away the mist, they spotted a column of Confederate infantry marching toward them. At 7:30 A.M., Lieutenant Marcellus Jones rested a breech-loading Sharps carbine on a fence rail and fired at the enemy. It was the first shot in the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere.

  Why were these soldiers here, more than one hundred miles north of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, where they had confronted each other until only three weeks earlier? After scrambling up the steep bank on the north side of Route 30 to look at the small “first shot” marker to the left of an abandoned house, let's head southeast on Route 30 almost two miles to the parking lot behind the guide station at the National Park entrance. From there we'll walk a hundred yards south to get away from the traffic noise. Here is a good place to answer the question: What brought these two armies to Gettysburg?

  Those who have watched the electric map presentation at the National Park Visitor Center have learned the apparently paradoxical fact that the Confederates approached Gettysburg from the north and the Union army came up from the south. Having seized the initiative and invaded Pennsylvania, Southern troops got there first while the Army of the Potomac followed cautiously, remaining between the invaders and Washington to the southeast. Thus, when fate brought the armies together at Gettysburg, Union soldiers arrived from the south and southeast and Confederates from the northwest and north.

  The preceding six months had been a low point for the Union cause. On December 13, 1862, the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, had attacked General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock. There the Yankees had sustained a disastrous and humiliating defeat. Northern spirits plummeted. “The people have borne, silently and grimly, imbecility, treachery, failure, privation, loss of friends,” editorialized the leading Northern magazine, Harper's Weekly, “but they cannot be expected to suffer that such massacres as this at Fredericksburg shall be repeated.” When Lincoln heard the news of Fredericksburg, he said, “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”

  Morale in the Army of the Potomac sank to its lowest point during the winter of 1862-63. “The army is tired with its hard and terrible experience,” wrote twenty-one-year-old Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was recovering from the second of three wounds he would receive in the war (the third would keep him out of the battle of Gettysburg). “I've pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence.”

  Things would get worse for the North before they got better. At the end of April, a new commander of the Army of the Potomac, Major General Joseph Hooker, launched an offensive at the crossroads hostelry of Chancellorsville, a few miles west of Fredericksburg. After getting in the enemy's rear and gaining a tactical advantage, however, Hooker lost his nerve and yielded the initiative to Lee. The ensuing battle of Chancellorsville, May 1-5, 1863, marked Lee's most brilliant achievement. Facing greatly superior numbers, he divided his army three times in a series of flank and frontal attacks that bewildered Hooker. Although Lee's ablest subordinate, Lieutenant General Stonewall Jackson, was wounded by friendly fire on May 2, the Army of Northern Virginia went on to inflict another humiliating defeat on the enemy.

  Jackson's death from pneumonia (which set in after his wounding) on May 10 tempered the joy in the South produced by Chancellorsville. Nevertheless, confidence abounded that one more Confederate victory in this theater would offset Union successes in Mississippi and win Confederate independence. Lee decided to carry the war into Pennsylvania in a bid to conquer a peace on Northern soil. To the Confederate government in Richmond, Lee presented the dazzling prospect that an invasion of Pennsylvania would remove the enemy threat on the Rappahannock, take the armies out of war-ravaged Virginia and enable the Confederates to supply themselves from the rich Pennsylvania countryside, and relieve the pressure on Confederate armies in the west by compelling Union forces there to send reinforcements to the east. Lee's plan might also strengthen Northern Peace Democrats (so-called Copperheads) in their arguments for an armistice and peace negotiations; discredit Lincoln and his war policies, including the Emancipation Proclamation issued five months earlier; encourage European diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy; and perhaps even capture Harrisburg or Baltimore and hold the city hostage for a cease-fire and negotiations.

  Confederate President Jefferson Davis told Lee to go ahead. In the post-Chancellorsville aura of invincibility, anything seemed possible for the Army of Northern Virginia. “There never were such men in an army b
efore,” wrote Lee in June 1863 as his troops started north. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led.” After Jackson's death, Lee had reorganized the army from two corps (under Jackson and Lieutenant General James Longstreet) into three corps of three divisions each, commanded by Long-street, A. P. Hill, and Richard Ewell (who got most of Jackson's old corps). Both Hill and Ewell earned their promotion to corps command with the rank of lieutenant general by their records as successful division commanders under Jackson—though Ewell had only recently returned to the army after losing a leg at Second Manassas the previous August. Major General Jeb Stuart commanded the army's cavalry corps. All of these men except Longstreet were Virginians, as were five of the nine division commanders—a source of complaint and jealousy among some non-Virginians in an army two-thirds of whose soldiers were from states other than Virginia.

  During the second week of June, the Army of Northern Virginia moved north through the Shenan-doah Valley toward the Potomac River, keeping the Blue Ridge Mountains between themselves and Union cavalry that probed the mountain gaps to track the enemy. The Northern cavalry gave a good account of itself for almost the first time in this theater, especially at the battle of Brandy Station (near Culpeper, Virginia) on June 9. Some of the best fighting in these cavalry actions was done by a Union division under Brigadier General John Buford, a native of Kentucky whose cousin was a brigadier general in the Confederate army.

  Jeb Stuart's Confederate horsemen had been surprised and roughly handled at Brandy Station. Stuart's ego may have been bruised by the criticism this affair provoked in the South. His daring exploits and accurate scouting reports during the previous year had won Stuart deserved fame. He dressed the part of a dashing cavalier: knee-high boots, elbow-length gauntlets, a red-lined cape with a yellow sash, and a felt hat with pinned-up brim and ostrich-feather plume. After Brandy Station, he was determined to dispel criticism and live up to his reputation by performing some new bold and dramatic deed.