I stopped in Gettysburg yesterday for a few hours. I was driving by,
as I have several times before, but finally decided to stop, even
though I didn't have my kids (which is why I had waited). Today I
told myself I was on an advance scouting mission. It was a chilly but
pretty day, and the crowds were negligable (especially at 8 AM when I
arrived). I was very affected by it. Such a beautiful place, and such
an awful story of bloodshed. To walk where it took place carried my
imagination.. I have never stopped at any battlefields before. It
seemed dumb. But now I know why people do it.
To picture it, to feel it, to almost experience it at some very
remote level.. The numbers make it tough to adaquately imagine,
though the paintings helped. Just on this one quarter-mile section I
walked, (nicknamed the High Water Mark of the Confederacy) more than
5000 troops died in about one hour, constituting the portion of the
battle known as Pickett's charge, the action that turned the tide
decisively for the Union. From the top of the small ridge where the
Union cannons had stood, you could see about a mile away to where Lee
had watched his army be defeated, from the very woods from which
those troops had emerged. I felt it especially at one point when I
crossed a stonewall at the base of the ridge, where the Union troops
had their best shot at you, just as you were slowed by that wall, if
you were making that charge...I felt like running up that hill,
imagining the bullets zinging around. Some of the Confederates
actually reached the top, and briefly captured the cannon up there,
before being driven back again, although most had died or had been
driven back at that point- plus they were being fired at by flanking
actions on either side..
I could see almost the entire area from that one ridge. The entire
battle of Gettysburg pitted Lee's army of 70,000 against Meade's
93,000 Union troops. Of those, more than 40,000 were killed or
wounded in three days of fighting. Impossible to imagine. The town
was left with almost every building full of wounded and dying, and
the thosandds of hastily buried or unburied dead all around.
In the National Cemetary, I saw the spot where Lincoln gave his
famous galvanizing two minute address , two years before the war was
over, at the site of the new cemetary for 3,500 of the Union dead,
almost half of which were buried as unknown soldiers (the army had
not yet started issuing "dog" tags.)
There is also an eighteen mile driving tour you can take, to see all
the major skirmish sites, but I left that for next time.
The park has a very well-organized and complete museum, and a great
ten minute film overview of the War, as well as a couple of
interesting multimedia exhibits about the battle. All-in-all I was
very impressed. In the museum, I saw remnants of buildings with
bullet holes, a bullet-pierced bed a Gettyburg woman had been laying
on when a stray bullet passed through her house- just missing killing
her (anouther woman was killed in her house in a similar manner), and,
I thought, a bloodstained table on which Stonewall Jackson's leg was