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New Perspectives on America's Epic Battle LINCOLN'S ADDRESS RECONSIDERED / DAN SICKLES' “MAD” ACT / REUNION ON LITTLE ROUND TOP / & MORE

VOL. 3, NO. 2

150 Gettysburg ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL

EXCLUSIVE:

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The Hardest Test in History

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Think getting into Harvard is tough?

Try gaining entry into Gettysburg’s elite cadre of licensed battlefield guides.

SUMMER 2013

+ $5.99

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.edu CIVILWARMONITOR.COM CIVILWARMONITOR.COM

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changed hands between the Union and Confederacy over 70 times.

Residents experienced constant uncertainty and turmoil, but life went on even as the cannon blasts of war thundered around them. to the 1860s at the Civil War Orientation Center Follow the trenches at Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historical Park

Pedal the trail at the Third Battle of Winchester Walking & Biking Path Imagine the General at his desk in Stonewall Jackson’s Headquarters Tour the Pritchard family’s home on the Kernstown Battlefield See soldiers‘ graffiti at the Old Courthouse Civil War Museum Sign up for a Guided Tour of Historic Towns or Battlefields Honor soldiers at the Union and Confederate Cemeteries

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COVER: 2012 D R E A M W O R K S I I D I S T R I B U T I O N C O ., L L C A N D T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y F O X F I L M C O R P O R AT I O N . A L L R I G H TS R E S E R V E D .

Learn the civilians’ stories at the Newtown History Center

Contents DEPARTMENTS

SPECIAL ISSUE

Gettysburg at

Salvo

{Facts, Figures & Items of Interest}

TRAVELS

.......................

My Gettysburg

VOLUME 3, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2013

6

VOICES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Talk of the Town

FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Gettysburg by the Numbers

150

RAPID FIRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Expert Takes on Gettysburg

PRESERVATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 An Unfinished Work

DISUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 When Texas Came to Gettysburg

BADGE OF HONOR 32

IN FOCUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Think getting into Harvard is tough? Try gaining entry into Gettysburg’s elite cadre of licensed battlefield guides. BY JENNY JOHNSTON

CONVERSATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

MAD DAN 48

Reunion on Little Round Top Director Ron Maxwell

Columns BATTLEFIELD ECHOES. . . . . . 28 The Army’s Living Classroom

CASUALTIES OF WAR . . . . . . . 30 The Dead of Gettysburg

Did Daniel Sickles, the Union’s most notorious general, save the day for the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg? That’s exactly what he wanted you to believe. BY ALLEN C. GUELZO

FACES OF GETTYSBURG 56

A selection of images—and stories—of some of the over 160,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who found themselves swept up in the epic engagement. BY RONALD C. CODDINGTON

THE LONG ROLL OF FIRE 68

Books & Authors ANGELS OF THE LOST CAUSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

BY THOM BASSETT

THE PARADOX OF THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS 78

In Every Issue EDITORIAL

.....................

CHRIS HEISEY

The Big One

From the war’s outset, the men of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry had never shied from a fight, shedding blood on the conflict’s grimmest battlefields. At Gettysburg, as Pickett’s Charge roared toward their lines, the Bay Staters would again be called into the breach. BY PATRICK BRENNAN

2

PARTING SHOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches in American history. But how to reconcile the wildly varying remembrances of those who were there to hear it?

BY GLENN W. L A FANTASIE

A Rare Reprieve

ON THE COVER: A view of the

Gettysburg battlefield.

1 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2013

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Editorial VOLUME 3, NUMBER 2 / SUMMER 2013

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

......

. . . . . . . . Laura June Davis

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

The Big One

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Angela Esco Elder David Thomson Robert Poister

. . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Berry

Patrick Brennan John Coski Judith Giesberg Allen C. Guelzo Amy Murrell Taylor

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

COPY EDITOR .

. . . . . . . . Matthew C. Hulbert

MATT@civilwarmonitor.com

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jennifer Sturak

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

. . . . . . . . . . . . Patrick Mitchell

(www.ModusOp.net)

SA RY

. . . . . . . . Zethyn McKinley ADVERTISING@civilwarmonitor.com (559) 492 9236

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR.

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WELL, IT’S FINALLY HERE, the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s most recognized battle: Gettysburg. This summer, the still-small Pennsylvania town that played host to the epic three-day engagement, which took place July 1-3, 1863, will be overrun by another invading force, as many thousands of tourists flock to an impressive array of commemorative events, from lectures and battle reenactments to book signings and musical concerts.

For much of the last 150 years, Gettysburg has been ANN the object of endless public and scholarly fascination.

RG I U But in recent years much of that focus has shifted elsewhere. Gettysburg used to be considered the event that marked the conflict’s “turning point,” but today that honor usually goes to one of several occurrences in the war’s western theater, like the fall of Vicksburg, Mississippi. At the same time, many buffs and scholars have moved their attention to events and issues that seem more current and unresolved, like the impact of the environment on Civil War armies or the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Still, there is something about Gettysburg that continues to attract long-time enthusiasts and new-to-the-Civil-War visitors alike—and no doubt always will. This issue’s lead article (“Badge of Honor,” page 32) is a testament to that special allure, chronicling the lengths to which some Gettysburg “diehards” will go for the honor of leading visitors across the battlefield. And Stephen Berry’s “Casualties of War” column on the dead of Gettysburg (page 30) is a reminder of just how great the cost was to those who fought there.

You’ll find a lot (and a lot new) about Gettysburg—from stories of courage and loss to the contemporary reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—in the pages of this special issue. And while no single issue can capture everything there is to know about an event as significant as Gettysburg, we hope you’ll have a better sense of it all, including its enduring appeal, by the time you’re through.

Terry A. Johnston Jr.

TERRY@civilwarmonitor.com

CIRCULATION MANAGER .

WEBSITE

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Kevin M. Levin Robert H. Moore II Harry Smeltzer

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2 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2013

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One hundred and fifty years later, the cornerstone battle of the Civil War comes vividly to life as a national epic

GETTYSBURG THE LAST INVASION

Photos courtesy of the Library of Congress: Major General Winfield Scott Hancock; Colonel Strong Vincent; William Barksdale; Confederate dead, probably of Paul Semmes’ brigade, on the Rose Farm

ALLEN C . GUELZO “GETTYSBURG DESERVES TO BE INCLUDED AMONG THE FINEST CAMPAIGN STUDIES OF OUR GENERATION …It earns this distinction with smart and vivid writing, innovative organization, and insightful analysis…Guelzo takes his place among the very elite chroniclers of the Civil War’s most enduring military drama.”

—A. Wilson Greene, The Civil War Monitor

“ A MARVELOUS BOOK that deserves to be read and savored.

And it deserves to be on the bookshelf of all Civil War buffs.”

—Jay Winik, author of April 1865

“ A STIRRING ACCOUNT …

ROBUST, MEMORABLE.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

K NOPF www.aaknopf.com

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Salvo { FA C T S , F I G U R E S & I T E M S O F I N T E R E S T }

Waves of Union soldiers advance during the Battle of Gettysburg in this 1867 lithograph.

FOR MORE ON GETTYSBURG, TURN THE PAGE.

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IN THIS SECTION Travels

MY GETTYSBURG

.................

6

Voices

TALK OF THE TOWN . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Figures

GETTYSBURG BY THE NUMBERS . . . . 12 Rapid Fire

EXPERT TAKES ON GETTYSBURG . . . 14 Preservation

AN UNFINISHED WORK . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Disunion

WHEN TEXAS CAME TO GETTYSBURG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 In Focus

REUNION ON LITTLE ROUND TOP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Conversation

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

DIRECTOR RON MAXWELL . . . . . . . 26

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Salvo | Travels

18th century, find the site of his tavern (look for the marker behind the Gettysburg Hotel), fastforward in my thoughts to see the Confederate flag being hoisted above the town, and trace the walk that President Abraham Lincoln took from the train station to the Wills House on the eve of the Gettysburg Address.

My Gettysburg

Interested in visiting Gettysburg? To help make the most of your trip, we enlisted an expert on the town and asked for his 10 favorite spots on or near the battlefield.

WILLOUGHBY’S RUN

| 1 | Willoughby’s Run saw the opening action at Gettysburg when Confederates from James J. Archer’s brigade clashed with Federals from the Iron Brigade.

There, I can picture Tennessee and Alabama soldiers charging through and then being forced back across the sluggish stream. I can be at peace at the place where the Civil War’s greatest battle began in earnest. In 23 years, I have never seen another visitor there.

OAK RIDGE

| 2 | Oak Ridge witnessed the 1

initial repulse and then success of Robert E. Rodes’ Confederate division over Union I Corps soldiers on July 1. Its shortened War Department observation tower still provides magnificent views of most of the first day’s field and to the town and beyond. I can never inspect Oak Ridge’s many monuments without envisioning the tragedy of Alfred Iverson Jr.’s brigade, whose North Carolinians were slaughtered to the west in Forney’s Field.

THE EXPERT

WOODED FOOTHILLS OF BIG ROUND TOP

GARRY ADELMAN is

director of history and education at the Civil War Trust, vice president of the Center for Civil War Photography, a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg, and the author, coauthor, or editor of 20 Civil War books, including Devil’s Den: A History and Guide (1997) and Gettysburg in 3-D (2013).

DEVIL’S DEN

| 5 | Devil’s Den is my favorite place in the world. Its scenic beauty alone warrants its designation as a national park, but it has also hosted a terrible battle, abundant documentary photography in the postwar years, and a fascinating struggle between business interests and the gov-

GETTYSBURG SQUARE

| 3 | Gettysburg Square is quite literally the center of all things in Adams County, Pennsylvania.

Despite the seemingly ever-present traffic and noise, I can walk around the hub of the town as laid out by James Gettys in the

Willoughby’s Run

3

2

Oak Ridge

| 4 | The wooded foothills of Big Round Top comprise an odd combination of the beautiful and the horrific. The serenity of the place today belies the fighting there on July 2 and 3, 1863. On these slopes, I walk on and off trail, hike through the Devil’s Kitchen, descend to the Slaughter Pen, and picture the fighting from Little Round Top to Devil’s Den to the ill-fated charge of Elon Farnsworth’s brigade of Union cavalry. In a light rain in 1991, I read more than 200 pages of Harry Pfanz’s Gettysburg: The Second Day while overlooking the very scenes he brought to life.

Gettysburg Square

STEVEN STANLEY ( WILLOUGHBY’S RUN), BRUCE GUTHRIE (OAK RIDGE), MICHAEL WARICHER (GETTYSBURG SQUARE, BIG ROUND TOP), ROB SHENK (DEVIL’S DEN)

WHILE CIVIL WAR ENTHUSIASTS have seemingly countless locations they might visit to feed their interest, few sites hold the allure of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Every year, some 3 million people descend upon the small town (population 7,622 in 2011) to walk its historic streets and trek across its expansive battlefield park, looking to bring themselves closer to the monumental events that occurred there in 1863. It’s a trend that promises to continue as we celebrate the 150th anniversaries of the epic battle in July and Abraham Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address in November.

6 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2013

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Big Round Top

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Devil’s Den

7 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOE

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THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2013

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Salvo | Travels

Little Round Top

8

7

Upper Culp’s Hill

The Rose Farm

ernment that almost resulted in Gettysburg becoming a giant amusement park instead of a historic shrine. Here, visitors can hike in the footsteps of soldiers and veterans, touching the same rocks that appear in the striking post-battle photos of Confederate dead among the boulders. Even in one of the Civil War’s most popular places, I can experience a little thrill of danger and find tranquility in one of its caves.

LITTLE ROUND TOP

| 6 | Little Round Top has become so popular in recent decades that it’s almost a cliché, but my attraction to the most well-known of all Civil War hills endures. With its unparalleled vistas I can see and explain not only the fight for Little Round Top, but all of Confederate general James Longstreet’s July 2 attack. Seeing what the soldiers

saw, walking where they charged, and seeing and touching the fortifications they built opens a window to the past for me. Transformative, temporal experiences are legion on this rocky Gibraltar.

9

Lower Rock Creek

10

East Confederate Avenue

THE ROSE FARM

| 7 | The Rose Farm saw heavy combat on July 2 between Joseph B. Kershaw’s and Paul J. Semmes’ Confederate brigades and John R. Brooke’s Union brigade. But for me, Gettysburg’s bloodiest farm is more about the aftermath than the fighting itself.

The Rose Farm was little known until 1975, when historian William A. Frassanito identified it as the site of numerous Civil War photos of human carnage. In fact, the 12 Alexander Gardner negatives showing 44 Confederate bodies represent the most photos of Civil War dead recorded anywhere. Here, I reflect upon the horror of a battle’s after-

math, trace the steps of Alexander Gardner’s crew, and am often moved by the nightmare that faced Gettysburg farmers in 1863.

UPPER CULP’S HILL

| 8 | Upper Culp’s Hill was never captured by Confederates, but not for lack of effort on all three days of the battle. The July 1 attempt was only a scouting mission, but the next two days saw intense and bloody efforts to capture the crest.

PHOTO CREDITS: ROB SHENK (LITTLE ROUND TOP), GARRY ADELMAN (ROSE FARM, LOWER ROCK CREEK), MICHAEL WARICHER (UPPER CULP’S HILL), LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (CONFEDERATE AVE.)

6

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Explore

Gettysburg with confidence

This app will help you plan your trip and guide you to all the important sites you want to see. There are over 175 sites and the app will guide you with GPS technology. Once there, you can learn more about the events that occurred in July of 1863 from award-winning historians including James M. McPherson, Eric Wittenberg and others.

www.gettysburg150app.com

I love roaming the hill; it is rarely crowded and the scores of 1860s images taken here allow me to stand where photographers stood and picture the Culp’s Hill of old. When hiking the steep eastern slope, seeing the earthworks, or gazing down upon Cemetery Hill from the elevated crest (or tower), I am reminded why the Confederates failed to capture the hill even with superior numbers and how much more militarily significant it was than Little Round Top. LOWER ROCK CREEK

| 9 | Lower Rock Creek was crossed by Confederates en route to Culp’s Hill. Union soldiers from the XII Corps and Confederates of Edward Johnson’s division skirmished along and across the watercourse on July 2 and 3.

Walking along the creek puts

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me near Spangler’s Spring (the scene of heavy fighting on July 3) and close to Neill or “Lost” Avenue (the extreme Union right flank), and allows me to see the site of McAllister’s Mill (a documented stop on the Underground Railroad). When I need a challenge, I enjoy searching for 19th-century swimming holes.

EAST CONFEDERATE AVENUE

| 10 | The beautiful curves of East Confederate Avenue were not there during the battle, as the avenue was not constructed until 1900. But the road’s twists and bends between Rock Creek and the high wooded hills, its everchanging foliage, and its beautifully maintained stone walls make it my favorite Gettysburg road to traverse, especially on a bicycle.

5/18/13 12:17 AM

Salvo | Voices

Talk of the Town “I heard two cavalrymen talking that morning and one of them said, ‘Well, the ball is about to open.’!”

—FARMER NATHANIEL LIGHTNER, WHO JOURNEYED INTO TOWN WITH A FRIEND ON JULY 1, 1863, UNAWARE OF EITHER ARMY’S PRESENCE, AND WAS CAUGHT IN THE TIDE OF UNION SOLDIERS ON THEIR WAY TO JOIN THE BATTLE

“What pen can tell or thought conceive the awfulness of the strife that has raged[?] …

[T]here is a silence around us now that is ominous of tomorrow’s struggle. Thousands of brave ones lie upon their arms, girded for conflict, snatching a few moments’ rest.”

—GETTYSBURG RESIDENT JANE SMITH, IN A DIARY ENTRY DATED MIDNIGHT, JULY 2, 1863

—SARAH BARRETT KING, GETTYSBURG RESIDENT, RECALLING A JULY 1, 1863, CONVERSATION

“We rushed up the cellar steps to the kitchen. The barn was in flames and cast a lurid glare through the window.

The house was filled with Rebels and they were deliberately firing it ….

[W]e pled with them in pity to spare our home. But there was no pity in those determined faces. They were ‘Louisiana Tigers,’ they boasted, and tigers indeed they were.”

—AMELIA HARMON, AGE 17, WHO LIVED WITH HER AUNT IN A HOUSE WEST OF SEMINARY RIDGE, DIRECTLY IN THE PATH OF THE CONFEDERATE ADVANCE, ON AN ENCOUNTER SHE HAD ON JULY 1, 1863

“It will be a long time before Gettysburg will forget the Army of the Potomac. Their houses are battered, some of them with great holes through and through them. Their streets are filled with old caps, pieces of muskets, haversacks, scraps of war everywhere, and even the children fling stones across the streets, and call to each other, ‘Here, you rebel, don’t you hear that shell?’”

—GEORGEANNA (“GEORGY”) WOOLSEY, A U.S. SANITARY COMMISSION NURSE STATIONED AT CAMP LETTERMAN, A MILITARY HOSPITAL LOCATED NEAR THE GETTYSBURG BATTLEFIELD, IN A LETTER DATED AUGUST, 6, 1863

“By this time, amputating benches had been placed about the house…. I saw … the surgeons sawing and cutting off arms and legs, then again probing and picking bullets from the flesh. Some of the soldiers fairly begged to be taken next, so great was their suffering, and so anxious were they to obtain relief.”

—FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD TILLIE PIERCE, ON THE SCENE SHE ENCOUNTERED WHEN ARRIVING WITH FRIENDS AT THE GETTYSBURG FARM OF THE WEIKERT FAMILY ON JULY 3, 1863 SOURCES: WOOLSEY QUOTED IN LETTERS OF A FAMILY DURING THE WAR FOR THE UNION, 1861-1865 VOL. 2 (1899); ALL OTHER QUOTES FROM JOHN ALEXANDER AND JIM SLADE, FIRESTORM AT GETTYSBURG: CIVILIAN VOICES, JUNE-NOVEMBER 1863 (1998).

F R A N C I S M I L L E R , T H E P H OTO G R A P H I C H I STO RY O F T H E C I V I L WA R ; A DA M S C O U N T Y H I STO R I C A L S O C I E T Y, G E T T YS B U R G , PA

“ [W]e met … Union troops pouring along the road and through the fields, coming out every street and alley … all rushing pell-mell forward, without any apparent order, with fixed bayonets, eager-eyed, stripped, perspiring and panting in the hot sun. They cursed us for being in the way, butted us back, and would have run right over us if we had not dodged out of their way.”

10 THE CIVIL WAR MONITOR SUMMER 2013

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KRXUV RI SHRSOH HYHQWV WKDW KHOS GRFXPHQW WKH $PHULFDQ VWRU\ Watch live coverage of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg on June 30.

Visit c-span.org/history for more information.

U.S.S. Constitution

Mount Vernon

Created by Cable.

Offered as a Public Service.

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Salvo | Figures

NUMBER OF HORSES AND MULES USED BY BOTH ARMIES DURING THE CAMPAIGN:

Gettysburg By the Numbers THE BATTLE AT Gettysburg overwhelmed the small Pennsylvania town and surrounding area with its massive size. More than 160,000 men from the opposing armies enveloped the city, which had a population of just 2,400. By the time the fighting ended, there were more than 46,000 Union and Confederate casualties. On this page are a variety of figures associated with the battle that go beyond the standard strengths and losses, and hint further at the scope—and impact—of the epic fight.

OLDEST GENERAL OFFICER AT GETTYSBURG:

YOUNGEST GENERAL OFFICER AT GETTYSBURG:

HIGHEST TEMPERATURE DURING THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG:

67,000 NUMBER OF ARTILLERY PIECES IN ACTION AT THE BATTLE:

87° F

(JULY 3)

NUMBER OF ABANDONED WEAPONS PICKED UP FROM THE BATTLEFIELD AFTER THE FIGHTING:

Brigadier General William “Extra Billy” Smith

65

STATES WITH THE LARGEST NUMBER OF SOLDIERS AT GETTYSBURG:

24,863

Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer

23

PERCENTAGE OF THOSE WEAPONS STILL LOADED:

85

STATES WITH THE LARGEST NUMBER OF CASUALTIES AT GETTYSBURG: NUMBER OF MEDALS OF HONOR AWARDED FOR ACTION AT GETTYSBURG:

PENNSYLVANIA

23,424

NUMBER OF CHILDREN KILLED

BY PLAYING WITH THOSE WEAPONS AFTER THE BATTLE: 4

NEW YORK

6,700

NUMBER OF GETTYSBURG CIVILIANS KILLED OR WOUNDED DURING THE BATTLE: 8

VIRGINIA

19,115

NORTH CAROLINA

6,127

SOURCES: Charles Teague, Gettysburg by the Numbers (Gettysburg, 2006); William A. Frassanito, Early

Photography at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, 1996), Rea A. Redd, The Gettysburg Campaign Study Guide, Vol. 1 (CreateSpace, 2012), and John M. Rudy. Compiled by Allen C. Guelzo.

65

2

WOMEN

6

MEN

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (SMITH AND CUSTER); PERMISSION GRANTED BY THE MILITARY & HISTORICAL IMAGE BANK , PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WEST POINT MUSEUM (MEDAL OF HONOR)

641

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MET-01

THROUGH SEPTEMBER 2

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

THE CIVIL WAR AND AMERICAN ART

metmuseum.org Open 7 days a week starting July 1 All exhibitions free with admission

Also on view through August 25 Paper Campaigns: American Civil War Prints, 1861–65

Photography and the American Civil War is made possible by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. The Civil War and American Art is made possible by an anonymous foundation. Additional support is provided by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund and the Enterprise Holdings Endowment. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. It was organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Above: Unknown artist, Captain Charles A. and Sergeant John M. Hawkins, Company E, “Tom Cobb Infantry,” 38th Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry, 1861–62, quarter-plate ambrotype with applied color, David Wynn Vaughan Collection; and Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky, 1861, oil on paper, Collection of Fred Keeler.

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Insertion date: JUNE 4, 2013 Size: 7.875" x 10.875" 4C MAG

TWO MAJOR EXHIBITIONS AT THE MET

Salvo | Rapid Fire

Expert Takes on Gettysburg 0F ALL CIVIL WAR BATTLES, Gettysburg remains among the most analyzed and debated. Countless authors—from veterans of the fight to modern-day buffs and scholars—have written about the three-day struggle, scrutinizing command decisions, dissecting minute tactical movements, pondering might-have-beens, and reflecting on the battle’s larger significance. With the battle’s 150th anniversary upon us, we thought it the perfect time to ask two of our favorite Gettysburg scribes—Allen C. Guelzo and Stephen W. Sears—to weigh in on a few of the more enduring questions about the epic engagement.

ALLEN C. GUELZO

STEPHEN W. SEARS

Failing to push either (or both) Richard Ewell and Powell Hill to take Cemetery Hill on July 1. He was sure that no other major portions of the Army of the Potomac were within less than a day’s march, and thus acquiring Cemetery Hill could safely be put off to the light of the next morning.

What was Robert E. Lee’s biggest mistake at Gettysburg?

The July 2 attack. It was a pitch-perfect repeat of the flank attack at Chancellorsville, and wrought even more havoc with the Army of the Potomac, which was left at day’s end with little more than two corps in any kind of reliable fighting shape.

Lee’s best decision?

His decision on the evening of July 3 to pack up and head for home with all possible speed.

Positioning Dan Sickles and the III Corps out of mind, but directly in the path of Longstreet’s assault. This was a reckless decision, and no moment to let personal or political animosities sway one’s better military judgment.

What was George Meade’s biggest mistake at Gettysburg?

Not maintaining a close enough eye on Dan Sickles on July 2, which would have prevented that blunderer from going off on his own with the III Corps.

Yielding to the advice of his corps commanders on both July 1 and the evening of July 2 to stay and fight things out to a conclusion. Meade never wanted a fight at Gettysburg, and would have pulled out on July 2 if his corps commanders had not protested.

Meade’s best decision?

His inability to manage his generals.

He let J.E.B. Stuart and Ewell go on as they pleased. With James Longstreet, he overmanaged, stubbornly refusing to listen to Old Pete’s questioning of his all-attack-all-the-time tactics.

Keeping John Reynolds in charge of the Army of the Potomac’s advance, and trusting him to select a proper battlefield on July 1.

} CONT. ON P. 16

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Salvo | Rapid Fire

ALLEN C. GUELZO

STEPHEN W. SEARS

Meade’s. Through the entire battle, Meade’s directives were almost entirely reactive. At the height of Pickett’s Charge, Meade wasn’t even around— he had decamped for Powers Hill, beside the Baltimore Pike. And after the battle, his lackadaisical pursuit of the Confederates is largely responsible for Lee’s escape and nearly two more years of war.

Whose Gettysburg performance is most overrated?

Joshua L. Chamberlain’s. Not because he didn’t perform brilliantly—he did— but because Michael Shaara (in The Killer Angels) and Ken Burns (in his PBS documentary The Civil War) presented him as far, far larger than life.

Oliver Otis Howard, who identified and acquired the most significant piece of real estate in Gettysburg: Cemetery Hill. While it’s likely he was acting on John Reynolds’ recommendations the evening before, Howard is still the one responsible for the decision to stay and hold Cemetery Hill after Reynolds’ death.

Who was the battle’s unsung hero?

Lieutenant Colonel Freeman McGilvery, commanding 41 guns of the reserve artillery, who surprised and savaged Pickett’s Charge. The Yankee artillery broke the back of the charge well before it reached the Angle.

That Meade won the Battle of Gettysburg. Lee lost it and lost it big! Meade showed almost no tactical initiative during the battle, and nearly lost it twice, by dangling the III Corps in the path of Longstreet’s attack on July 2, and then failing to reinforce John Gibbon’s and Alexander Hays’ divisions ahead of the attack on July 3. (Meade was convinced that morning that any Confederate attack would come from the north rather than the west.)

What’s the biggest myth surrounding Gettysburg?

That Lee lost the Battle of Gettysburg. Au contraire, Meade won Gettysburg. Spanking new to command, Meade managed his generals with skill and got exceptional performances from most of them (see Winfield Scott Hancock, Henry Hunt, George Greene, etc.). He covered Sickles’ blunder on July 2, and he had 13,000 men staged for Pickett’s Charge on July 3 who were not needed. Meade did nothing at Gettysburg that threatened defeat.

Gettysburg might have been the turning point if Meade had followed up in the days after the battle, or even launched a final attack at Williamsport. Even so, the victory restored the Army of the Potomac, and Lee was never again in a position to launch an invasion of the North.

Did the Battle of Gettysburg mark a turning point in the war?

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College. His newest work is Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Knopf, 2013).

Gettysburg triggered no perceptible turning point. But at every level of command, the Army of Northern Virginia suffered an irreparable loss of its lifeblood there, and was never the same afterward.

Stephen W. Sears is the author of a dozen books on the Civil War, including Gettysburg (Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

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Salvo | Preservation

An Unfinished Work PRESIDENT, CIVIL WAR TRUST

AS THE SESQUICENTENNIAL COMMEMORATION continues, we are continually reminded of the feats of valor and sacrifice that transpired on Civil War battlefields. But we must remember that these hallowed grounds are not automatically or effortlessly preserved.

They are the product of gradual and ongoing protection, commemoration, and interpretation efforts. ¶ Preservation of the Gettysburg battlefield began almost immediately after the fighting ended, when local citizens purchased land on Cemetery Hill to create the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. Driven by Gettysburg veterans and often funded by state governments, land purchases and the placement of unit and state monuments continued through the late 19th century, culminating with the creation of Gettysburg National Military Park in 1895. The growth of the battlefield continues today through the efforts of the National Park Service and private groups including the Civil War Trust, the Conservation Fund, the Gettysburg Foundation, and the Land Conservancy of Adams County.

The Trust has either purchased or assisted in the protection of about 900 acres on the Gettysburg battlefield. It uses a variety of methods: purchasing “inholdings” (small parcels of privately owned property surModern structures on the Trust-purchased Snyder Farm Tract are demolished in 2010 as part of the ongoing effort to return the Gettysburg battlefield to its 1863 appearance.

rounded by existing parkland); coordinating a purchase so that the land is simultaneously—or very nearly so—transferred to the federal government and the national park; or owning and maintaining the land until a transfer is possible.

Other projects are less common but significantly larger in scale. In 2011, a preservation partnership came together to purchase 95 acres that had been the golf course of the Gettysburg Country Club. The land, part of the Emmanuel Harman farm in

***

Look for regular preservation news and updates from the Civil War Trust in future issues.

To learn more about the organization and how you can help, visit www.civilwar.org

1863, had been the largest unprotected parcel on the battlefield.

Not only did its protection largely complete the preservation of the first day’s battlefield, it also provided a host of new interpretive opportunities, allowing full access to the length of the Confederate assault across Willoughby Run between Herr’s Ridge and McPherson’s Ridge for the first time.

Landscape restoration—reverting sections of the battlefield to their 1860s appearance—is another strategic goal for both the park and the Trust. The removal of the former park visitors center and cyclorama building from Zeigler’s Grove is the most prominent recent example, but numerous other projects have had dramatic impacts on the battlefield’s look. The Trust has worked closely with the park to remove non-historic structures from parcels it purchases, often before the land’s transfer. For example, the removal of two modern homes on a Trust-purchased parcel that was once part of the Philip Snyder farm along the Emmitsburg road re-established a viewshed between Little Round Top and Seminary Ridge that had been obstructed for decades. And just this March, the Trust removed a non-historic home from a newly purchased property along Taneytown Road, clearing the way for the park to build a walking trail following the land’s imminent transfer.

I hope you will consider joining the Trust as we continue protecting and restoring the Gettysburg battlefield.

C I V I L WA R T R U S T

BY O. JAMES LIGHTHIZER,

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Salvo | Disunion

When Texas Came to Gettysburg

BY RICHARD PARKER

THE TEXANS ARRIVED AFTER A grueling overnight march. As the sun rose over south-central Pennsylvania on the morning of July 2, 1863, they were ordered to a creek called Willoughby’s Run, west of the small town of Gettysburg, where water would be plentiful for a short breakfast before they were to take their battle positions. ¶ Soon after they settled, some members of the unit—once called Hood’s brigade and now, as a part of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Hood’s division—likely witnessed a historic and sober gathering of the Confederate leader and his top commanders: James Longstreet, A.P. Hill, and John Bell Hood, for whom the Texans had taken their name. Lee had great respect for Hood and his men; originally composed of the 1st, 4th, and 5th Texas Infantry, the men had gained fame and victory during the war, though at terrible human cost. Lee considered it the finest brigade in his army. Yet here was Lee in the soft July morning light, near the Texan camp, seemingly uneasy.

Lee, who knew Hood from his years as the superintendent at West Point, when Hood was a cadet, turned to him and said, “The enemy is here, and if we do not whip him, he will whip us.”

Lee was in command, but the chances for victory rode largely on Hood’s shoulders.

The Texans had arrived through a long and dangerous route. Initially assembling near Houston in 1861, the brigade was an ill-shod, rarely uniformed and oddly armed lot. They looked— and were looked upon—as ragged frontiersmen. They excelled at foraging, even against orders, and picked farm and chicken houses alike perfectly clean. But they would build a fearful reputation for bravery earned with considerable bloodshed.

Oddly for a unit so proud of its Texas roots, the men select-

ed Hood, a native of Kentucky, as their commander. Not that Hood was a complete stranger to the Lone Star State. After West Point, he had served on the Texas frontier in the cavalry and fought the Comanches at Fort Mason, in the sparsely populated center of the state. With the outbreak of the Civil War he resigned his Union commission and donned the Confederate gray as a captain, quickly rising to colonel.

Hood and his men fought with ferocious bravery at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill in June 1862, rushing past cowering Confederates and charging into the Federal lines over 100 yards away with fixed bayonets and a blood-curdling rebel yell. They broke through the Union lines, which proceeded to crumble.

Aided by the 18th Georgia, the Texans then withstood a charge

by Union cavalry, killing 150 of the enemy before the rest withdrew. The Confederate army took notice, and Hood was promoted to major general.

The Texans won further acclaim at Antietam, where one of the brigade’s regiments, the 1st Texas, lost 186 of its 226 men as casualties. “That those ragged,

This article is excerpted from Disunion, a New York Times online series following the course of the Civil War as it unfolded.

Read more at www.nytimes.com/ disunion.

filthy, wretched, sick, hungry and in all ways miserable men,” wrote a New York Herald reporter, “should prove such heroes in the fight is past explanation.

Men never fought better.”

After resting for most of the winter in Virginia and being supplemented with troops from Arkansas, Georgia, and Alabama, the Texans were reorganized into a division under Hood. Crossing into Maryland near Williamsport on June 24, they made camp with a confiscated batch of federal whiskey and proceeded to get fallingdown drunk. Some didn’t catch up to their units for 15 hours afterward. The Texans went on to raid farms for eggs, chickens, honey, and even shoes on the way north, watched by angry Pennsylvanians wrapped in Union colors on their front porches. “They are the ones,” said one, “who have killed so many of our soldiers.” But the shenanigans came to end as Lee concentrated his forces for battle later in the month.

At Gettysburg, Lee ordered Hood to fight under General James Longstreet, whose corps was lined up along the Union’s left flank. Longstreet said he would be relying heavily on Hood, since 5,000 additional troops under George Pickett had not yet arrived. “I never like to go into battle with one boot off,” he told Hood.

Hood, directed to take the lead along with several regiments of Alabamans, moved

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

out that afternoon. The men, on foot, moved rapidly for five miles along the Emmitsburg road. As they moved, Hood received intelligence from his scouts that the Union flank stopped just south of a hill called Big Round Top. Hood thought a victory could be snatched if that position could be seized.

Three times Hood asked Longstreet for permission to shift to the right to take advantage of the Union’s weak flank.

But Longstreet steadfastly insisted the attack go straight forward, through a rocky terrain full of Union sharpshooters called Devil’s Den. In the fighting, Hood’s troops veered to the south, and ended up assaulting a smaller rise just below Big Round Top called Little Round Top. In a brief but ferocious fight the Confederates overwhelmed the Federals at Devil’s Den. On horseback, Hood was hit by shrapnel and one arm was shattered, but his men fought on, convinced that victory at Little Round Top could turn the entire Union flank and win the battle.

But the Union troops used their cover tenaciously, and the Confederates were now caught in the saddle between the two Round Tops—an area that would thereafter be known as the Slaughter Pen, the scene of bloody, vicious hand-to-hand fighting as the Federals only grudgingly gave way, inch by inch, withdrawing up Little Round Top. Repeated assaults

by Texans and Alabamans failed to get to the crest.

Eventually the tide turned decisively against the southerners, particularly the Alabamans in Hood’s division. Trying to advance once more up Little Round Top they faced the plucky 20th Maine Infantry.

Confederate general John Bell Hood, whose Gettysburg division included his own fiercely proud Texas Brigade.

Running low on ammunition, the Maine men fixed bayonets and charged down the hill at Hood’s men, killing and scattering the remainder—saving Little Round Top and, effectively, turning the tide of both the Battle of Gettysburg and the American Civil War. As night fell, the Texans and their comrades withdrew.

As the third day of the battle dawned, it became apparent that Longstreet’s two divisions—one under Hood—had been “bled white on the previous day.”

Most held fast on the Confederate right as Pickett’s disastrous charge unfolded; only the 1st

Texas went into action, successfully repelling a group of Federal cavalry that threatened the Confederate flank.

Once again, the Texans had suffered immensely. Hood’s division was shattered, with 2,289 casualties, including 343 killed, 1,504 wounded, and 442 missing.

Casualties included top officers and company commanders.

On the evening of July 4, Lee withdrew from the battlefield, headed back to the safety of Virginia. Rain poured down and roads turned to mud as the remnants of the Confederate force headed south. } CONT. ON P. 92

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Salvo | In Focus

Reunion on Little Round Top

BY WILLIAM F. HOWARD THE OLD SOUTHERN GENERAL had returned to Gettysburg, the little Pennsylvania town where, a quarter-century earlier, an epic battle had raged through its streets and across its farm fields. Traveling on horseback with a small group of men—including Warner Miller, a Civil War veteran and former U.S. senator from New York, and Dan Butterfield, chief of staff to the Army of the Potomac’s commanding general during the battle—James Longstreet was now at the spot where the Rebel battle line had smashed against the Union position on Cemetery Ridge, an action remembered to history as Pickett’s Charge or Longstreet’s Assault. The charge came to be understood as “the high-water mark of the Confederacy,” the line separating its opportunity for victory from its slow decline toward eventual defeat.

It was July 3, 1888, the 25th anniversary of the day when the Battle of Gettysburg had reached its apex. Longstreet—dignified, rail thin, bushy white sideburns framing his face—stood at the spot known as the Bloody Angle, where the Army of Northern Virginia had come to the beginning of that end. A New York Times reporter, also attending the anniversary reunion that had brought the men to town, spotted him there, alone in his thoughts, staring “long and intently” off toward the “gloomy woods of Seminary Ridge,” across the fields over which thousands of Confederate soldiers had “dashed to make the memorable charge that decided the fortune of the day”—and, some still argue, the fate of the republic.

From this place, Longstreet and his companions rode off to Cemetery Hill, then to Little Round Top, the rocky incline where the Union army had anchored its left flank on the afternoon of July 2, 1863. There, in a now-famous heroic defense, a handful of Union soldiers under Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain

7 8

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Presented by the Center for Civil War Photography, a non-profit organization devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images for the public benefit. To learn more about the CCWP and its mission, visit www.civilwarphotography.org

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Former Confederate general James Longstreet (1) poses for the camera on the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg’s final day. With him are former Union generals Dan Butterfield (2), Daniel Sickles (3), Joseph Carr (4), John Hartranft (5), and Henry Slocum (6), as well as U.S. Senator Warner Miller (7) and former 20th Maine commander Joshua L. Chamberlain (8).

5 7

2

Above: Tktktktk

1

4

COURTESY WILLIAM F. HOWARD

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

6

3

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Salvo | In Focus

hat is Joshua L. Chamberlain, who, like Longstreet, had stumbled into the group of visitors.

A few months later, Chamberlain would give a speech at the monument dedicated to the service of his old regiment, the 20th Maine Infantry, which would help to define Gettysburg’s symbolic power in American history.

In that speech he said:

a large rock.” Now there was no escaping as he was guided to a prominent spot next to Sickles.

While Sickles talked with Longstreet, the photographer readied his camera. As the photographer shouted, “All ready!” the reporter noted that many of the former officers raised their chins in a proud pose. In distinction, the photo depicts Longstreet as resigned or unnerved.

Standing to his right is Slocum, who had commanded the Army of the Potomac’s XII Corps at Gettysburg, and just over his shoulder, Dan Butterfield. To Longstreet’s left stand Sickles and two other Civil War generals, Joseph B. Carr and John F. Hartranft.

Longstreet may or may not have been aware of another officer who posed with him that day. Standing next to Slocum and holding a light-colored top

Helen Dortch Longstreet, the general’s second wife, kept the July 3, 1888, photograph of her husband and his old adversaries featured on the previous page. It was found in her personal archives.

In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls.

And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field to ponder and dream; And lo!

The shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.

Chamberlain’s words seem fitting when looking at this old photograph—a split second of memory recorded by chance and discovered in the personal archives of Longstreet’s second wife, Helen Dortch Longstreet.

The old Confederate general who had reconciled with his nation had returned to Gettysburg, the battlefield of his greatest defeat, and stood for a brief moment in the company of his former adversaries. Today, the spot where the photo was taken is graced by an impressive castlelike monument to the 44th New York Infantry. Early on the afternoon of July 3, 1888, however, an impromptu meeting there bore testimony to the power of forgiveness, respect, and reconciliation as a nation divided by bloody war emerged reunited from its horrific trial by fire.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

fought to hold the position and save the Union line from total rout. When his ammunition was exhausted, Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge, and pushed back the advancing enemy until fresh Union troops arrived to secure the position. Chamberlain was celebrated as one of the genuine heroes of the fight and awarded the Medal of Honor.

As Longstreet and his party climbed Little Round Top’s rocky slope, he was surprised to find other distinguished tourists already gathered there. Several former Union generals and veterans, fresh from attending a monument ceremony on another part of the field, were milling around talking to some reporters. Longstreet attempted to shy away from the scene when a photograph was taken of the group.

He was preparing to leave when another throng of visitors, including former Union generals Daniel Sickles and Henry Slocum, appeared. Sickles, the controversial and notoriously selfpromoting general who had lost a leg at Gettysburg, had arrived in a carriage and been helped up the slope of Little Round Top by veterans still devoted to their old leader. There was little of Sickles’ bluster on this day, however, as he made his way over to Longstreet and shook his hand, joking to the crowd that “this was General Longstreet’s second reception on Little Round Top.” A photographer suggested that another image be taken. As the group jostled and moved together for position, the Times reporter noted how uncomfortable Longstreet seemed before the camera. When he was first asked to join the photo, he had initially faded to the back of the crowd and “attempted to hide behind

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Salvo | Conversation

Reflections on Gettysburg, 20 Years Later

BY PATRICK BRENNAN

Where did the idea for the movie come from?

My second wife read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara and said to me, “I think you could make this into a movie.” This was in 1978. I read it on a train to Los Angeles. As soon as I arrived I called my agent and said, “I have to make this movie.” It was a great piece of literature with incredible characters that took an impossible thing—the Battle of Gettysburg—and made it conceivable. I was absolutely swept away. A few years later— after I’d acquired the rights to the book but before I had started the screenplay—I spoke with Michael Shaara. He offered to walk me through the battle. So we met in Gettysburg—it was my first trip there—and Michael was my guide. We walked the battlefield the way his novel breaks it down. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

What was the first reading of the screenplay like?

My good friend Richard Jordan— the actor who played Confederate general Lewis Armistead in the movie—helped me organize a reading. A few dozen topnotch actors agreed to read

parts: Blair Brown was Fanny Chamberlain, Hal Holbrook read Robert E. Lee, and Peter Donat read James Longstreet.

We started around 6 p.m. and finished about midnight. When we got to the last page, the room fell silent. Some of the actors had tears in their eyes. And then they just spontaneously applauded. They weren’t clapping for me. I knew in that moment I was going to make the movie, no matter what.

But you ran into challenges?

Plenty. Early on, Hal Holbrook connected me with Ted Turner, who loves the Civil War. But TBS, his cable channel, didn’t have the budget. So I looked for other ways to get it produced. I went to Poland and Hungary, where all those big Napoleonic movies were made and where you could rent an army. At the time, reenacting was really growing in the U.S., so the option of making the movie stateside was looking more desirable, because instead of mere extras I’d have thousands of Civil War buffs filling the screen. But nobody in Hollywood seemed interested in an epic about the subject.

RONALD F. MAXWELL

WHO:

Film director

DATE OF BIRTH:

January 5, 1949 HOMETOWN: Clifton, New Jersey FACTOID:

Played the role of Hamlet as a student at NYU SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY:

Copperhead, 2013 Gods and Generals, 2003 Gettysburg, 1993 The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, 1981 Little Darlings, 1980

What changed?

When my friend Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War aired on PBS in 1990, the network executives were shocked that some 40 million people tuned in. Within a week, CBS announced it was doing a big miniseries on the Battle of Gettysburg. I couldn’t believe it.

I’d been at work on this movie for over a decade, with hardly a bite. And now somebody else was going to do Gettysburg. I knew CBS wouldn’t be able to commission a script overnight, especially one like we had. Still, we had to scramble. We pitched NBC and ABC, capitalizing on the herd mentality in Hollywood. We made a deal with ABC, but then they dropped us.

Suddenly we were back in the dumpster.

Then, Ken Burns got a Producers Guild Award for The Civil War. He told me to come, because Ted Turner would be presenting his award. During the presentation, Ted spent 15 minutes talking about how nuts it is that Hollywood doesn’t want to produce Civil War films.

Later, he asked me the status of my movie. I told him. He said, “Let’s do it—have your people call my people.” Within 48 hours we had a handshake deal.

And the rest is history.

Not quite. A Turner development executive with no connection to the material called for a

COURTESY OF BRAINSTORM MEDIA

IN JUNE 1863, it took the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac 28 days to move from their camps at Fredericksburg, Virginia, to the fields and hills around Gettysburg. For filmmaker Ron Maxwell, bringing their story to the big screen took 13 years of struggle, culminating in triumph with the 1993 theatrical release of a movie that helped launch a great Civil War reawakening. Here, Maxwell tells how Gettysburg almost didn’t get made—and why he thinks the film is so enduring.

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total rewrite of the screenplay.

The new version was terrible— but luckily that executive got fired. Who came in to replace her? The ABC executive who had made a deal with us a few years earlier. Within 48 hours he greenlit the original script.

Gettysburg was supposed to be a TV miniseries. It’s why we filmed five hours of material. But when Ted Turner saw the first week’s dailies, everything looked so good, especially the acting, so he decided he’d release it theatrically, as a long film with an intermission. Fortunately, we were filming in theatrical format, not the squarer format associated with television production, so the switch was seamless.

Do any particular moments or scenes stand out for you?

NEW LINE CINEMA/PHOTOFEST

Two come to mind. The first scene we filmed, with Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet before the first day’s battle, as they pass by a brass band playing “Bonnie Blue Flag,” and the last scene we filmed, when the Chamberlain brothers embrace at dusk, after the battle is over.

Also, I was amazed by the commitment the actors brought to their roles. When Stephen Lang heard we were casting the movie, he walked up to me backstage at a play in New York and introduced himself by saying, “Hello, I’m George Pickett.” All of the actors had the same attitude. They were so happy to be part of the production, and lost themselves in their characters.

Just total immersion.

Do you think Gettysburg has stood the test of time?

In April 2012, the Smithsonian held a Civil War weekend where they screened four movies: Gone With The Wind, Glory, Gettys-

In the aftermath of Pickett's Charge, Union soldiers tend to mortally wounded Confederate general Lewis Armistead (played by Richard Jordan) in this scene from Ron Maxwell’s movie Gettysburg.

burg, and its prequel, Gods and Generals. People came up to me to shake my hand and thank me for both Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. Both films continue to be watched and have been embraced by American and international audiences. It all comes back to the story. At its core, Gettysburg is a movie about officers in high command.

Why do good, moral, ethical people go to war? The exploration of why they were fighting— I think we got that right.

PATRICK BRENNAN,

author of this issue’s article “The Long Roll of Fire” (see page 68), is a member of the Monitor’s editorial advisory board and author of the book Secessionville: Assault on Charleston (1996).

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Battlefield Echoes

Gettysburg: The Army’s Living Classroom

B Y

C L AY

M O U N T C A S T L E

URING ANY VISIT to Gettysburg National Battlefield Park it is not uncommon to encounter a group of military officers, noncommissioned officers, soldiers, or cadets huddled together, staring intently at the ground. They pore over maps, engage in long, animated discussions, and often scribble down notes. While casual visitors to the park take photos or read inscriptions on the multitude of striking unit monuments that dot the battlefield, these military groups immerse themselves in what they call the “staff ride,” a terrain-focused analysis of tactical decision-making and leadership.

They examine not just what happened in the battle, but how and why it happened. And no other battle in American history provides more lessons for current military leaders than the one that occurred over three hot days in early July 1863.

In the 1980s, Michael Shaara’s landmark novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, could be found on almost any U.S. Army reading list, and commanders and their staffs began to put the pilgrimage to Gettysburg on the training calendar. Within a few years, it was hard to find an officer who had not visited the battlefield at least once. In 1987, the Army published a pamphlet entitled The Staff Ride, an official endorsement of what was already

a popular practice within the officer corps. In the pamphlet’s forward, Gettysburg was said to “reflect valued principles for study by today’s leaders.”¹ Like the battlefield itself, these principles are timeless.

The lessons from Gettysburg are numerous, almost endless.

There are, however, a number of themes and battlefield sites that seem to resonate with military groups. A common starting point for staff rides is near the statue of Major General John Reynolds to the west of town on the Chambersburg Pike.

Looking westward out to Herr Ridge, groups can take in the terrain that lay before Brigadier General John Buford as he prepared to meet the first elements of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which

THE STAFF RIDE DEFINITION:

An Army technique for military education that combines rigorous historical preparation with an examination of the actual battle terrain.

EARLIEST KNOWN AMERICAN EXAMPLE:

A 1906 ride led by Major Eben Swift for 12 officerstudents from the General Service and Staff School, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the Chickamauga battlefield.

QUOTABLE:

“Gettysburg[’s] ... leadership principles transcend technological advances and have no historical bounds, no binding parameters of geography and time.”

—THE STAFF RIDE

BY WILLIAM GLENN ROBERTSON

was approaching along the pike early on the morning of July 1.

Buford’s understanding of what was at stake, his choice of terrain, and his manner of employing his greatly outnumbered cavalry along the ridgelines made his performance a model of efficient tactical command.

Buford’s desperate delaying action managed to hold off Major General Henry Heth’s Confederate brigades until Reynolds arrived with reinforcements from his I Corps.

Standing in the shadow of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial on Oak Hill and staring south toward Gettysburg, groups can contemplate the advance of Major General Richard Ewell’s Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia on the town during the afternoon of July 1.

Here, they discuss the issues of commander’s intent and communication. Lee’s directive to Ewell earlier in the day to take Cemetery Hill “if practicable” resulted in the Confederates halting their advance short of the high ground, much to the dismay of some of Lee’s officers.² Should Ewell have seen the crucial importance of gaining Cemetery Ridge or Culp’s Hill and pressed the attack? Was Lee’s guidance too vague? Did Ewell miss a golden opportunity or make a sound judgment call? Such questions will never be answered fully, which is exactly why they are so valuable for military decision makers. Sifting through the arguments, examining the hypothetical, and engaging in counterfactual history are all useful exercises for conducting a critical analysis of Gettysburg and

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COURTESY BRIGADIER GENERAL (RET) JOHN W. MOUNTCASTLE

how it relates to battles in more modern conflicts.

There are few spots, if any, at Gettysburg that conjure martial mysticism like Little Round Top. Indeed, this rocky hill at the southern edge of the battlefield is perhaps the favorite stopping point of most military officers who visit the park.

Why? Bravery. Initiative. Guts.

The impressive defensive stand of the 20th Maine Infantry atop Little Round Top on the afternoon of July 2 and the steadfast leadership of its commander, the warrior-scholar Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, have inspired generations of military thinkers. A short walk along the ridgetop

Cadets from the United States Military Academy at West Point take in the view of the battlefield from Little Round Top during a Gettysburg staff ride.

leads to the statue of Brigadier General Gouverneur K. Warren and an ideal position to view the battlefield in its entirety. Here, staff ride groups contemplate the fish-hook-shaped defensive line established by the Union forces and debate the execution of Lee’s attack against its southern flank in the late afternoon of the battle’s second day. An almost unavoidable aspect of battle analysis is assigning fault or blame for tactical or operational failure. And from the vantage point on Little Round Top— with the Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, and the Peach Orchard in view—groups can picture battle scenes where there was no

shortage of blame, but also great reason for commendation.

The final, culminating event in most military visits to Gettysburg starts at the Virginia Monument, in the shadow of a mounted Robert E. Lee staring out across the half-mile stretch of open ground that saw the illfated Confederate frontal attack on the battle’s third day, known to history as Pickett’s Charge.

The view lends itself to bewilderment and head-scratching.

What was Lee thinking? How could he have sent his army across an open field, completely exposed to enemy artillery fire, against a heavily fortified Federal line? Did the } CONT. ON P. 92

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Casualties of War

The Dead of Gettysburg

BY STEPHEN BERRY

N AUGUST 1865, New York author John Townsend Trowbridge was seized by a sudden desire to travel the country and tour “the most noted battle-fields of the war.” He wanted, he said, to “follow in the track of the destroying armies” and “interview officers and soldiers of both sides.” Then he intended to make “a record of actual observations and conversations, free from fictitious coloring, [having] endeavor[ed], at all times and in all places, to receive correct impressions of the country, of its inhabitants, [and] of the great contest of arms just closed.” He was, in a sense, the war’s first tourist, and its first historian. And his first stop, as it continues to be for many Americans seeking a first taste of the war, was Gettysburg.¹ “Gettysburg is … pleasantly situated on the swells of a fine undulating country,” Trowbridge noted upon his arrival, but the village seemed to owe its existence “to the mere fact that several important roads found it convenient to meet at this point, to which accident also is due its historical renown: The circumstance which made it a burg made it likewise a battle-field.”² After touring that battlefield, Trowbridge took a stroll through the new soldiers’ cemetery, which was becoming quite lovely. Two years before a visitor would have seen “festering corpses at every step; some still

unburied; some [so] hastily and rudely buried [that] the appearance presented was almost as repulsive as where no attempt at burial had been made.” But by August 1865 the shallow trenches and wooden marker-boards had been replaced by ordered graves and gravestones. The gate and gatehouse were complete, iron fences and low stone walls marked the cemetery boundaries, and a macadamized road lolled through the main avenue.

There were as yet, however, no headstones for the “unknowns.”

“Their resting-places were indicated by a forest of stakes,” Trowbridge noted. And “I have seen few sadder sights…. Each man had his history; each soldier resting here had his interests, his loves, his darling hopes, the same as you or I. All were

THE COST OF GETTYSBURG ARMY OF THE POTOMAC:

23,055 casualties; 3,155 killed, 14,531 wounded, 5,369 captured/missing ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA:

23,231 casualties; 4,708 killed, 12,693 wounded, 5,830 captured/ missing QUOTABLE: “After the fight is over, then one realizes what has been going on.

Then [one] sees the wounded, hears the groans, see[s] perhaps his own dearest friend who he was talking to only a moment before, lie before him a mangled mass of blood and flesh, scarcely recognizable. To view death and destruction in every shape brings one back to his senses again.”

—LIEUTENANT COLONEL FRANCIS E. PIERCE, 108TH NEW YORK INFANTRY, REFLECTING ON THE FIGHTING OF JULY 3, 1863

laid down with his life. It was no trifle to him, it was as great a thing to him as it would be to you, thus to be cut off from all things dear in this world, and to drop at once into a vague eternity. Grown accustomed to the waste of life through years of war, we learn to think too lightly of such sacrifices. ‘So many killed,’—with that brief sentence we glide over … unimaginably fearful fact[s] and pass on to other details. We indulge in pious commonplaces.”³ Trowbridge was right. Gettysburg had been the scene of “unimaginably fearful facts.” But even as he wrote, those facts were being churned under by the “swells of a fine undulating country” and the Battle of Gettysburg was cohering as a narrative more ordered than its cemetery. In his Gettysburg address orator Edward Everett had woven all the key ingredients together: the tactical retreat through the village; the arrangement of the Federals’ “fish-hookshaped” defensive line; the fight for Little Round Top; the surge that broke at the Angle, saving Washington and the war.

But that was Gettysburg as told. As experienced, Gettysburg was a hyper-real, hyperlocal anarchy of gore. To the regimental surgeon of the 108th New York Infantry, Gettysburg would always be the whoosh of the shell passing so close that the fuse singed his whiskers.

Turning to track its path, the surgeon saw a whole battery of unluckier men he cared about now “rolling on the ground in agony” and “uttering unearthly

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

screams.” For him, the grand narrative of Gettysburg could never quite subsume this one terrifying tableau.⁴ And Trowbridge was right: Something important gets lost when we “glide over … fearful fact[s] and pass on to other details.” When Abraham Lincoln invoked “these honored dead” at Gettysburg, he was talking, in part, about Isaac Taylor, who had been “hit in the top of the head by shell fragments which took off the back of his head and traveled down his body nearly cutting him in half.” His brother Patrick cried as he buried him: “Well, Isaac, all I can give you is a soldier’s grave.” Alfred Sofield

Rebel dead lie in an unfinished grave on the Gettysburg battlefield. Nearly 8,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed during the three-day struggle.

was bisected the other way; a shell “exploded under [his] prostrate form … and literally cut him in two, leaving his heels in contact with his head.” Jefferson Copeland only heard a “stunning explosion” that left his entire shirtfront soaked in crimson.

Sure he was dead, he gradually realized that it was the man beside him, Travis Maxey, who had supplied the blood: “[T]he shell must have exploded inside of his body, as his neck, head, and the upper part of his chest were all gone, and he could be recognized only by his clothes.”⁵ At Gettysburg, men were shot through everything they had: nose, ear, throat, temple.

Samuel Zook was so shredded by a shell that it “expos[ed] his heartbeats to observation.” James McCleary was “so badly blown to pieces that … his ribs [were] broken open [and] you could see right into him.” John Cranston was “shot in the gluteus,” and, in deference to his pain and ebbing life, his comrades pretended not to notice the foul stench emerging from the wound. And of course, at Gettysburg, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, men were hit “in the region of the loins”—the kind of obfuscating language preferred in after-action reports. Robert Crawford was officially described as having received a mortal bowel wound passing } CONT. ON P. 92

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

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Think getting into Harvard is tough?

Try gaining entry into Gettysburg’s elite cadre of licensed battlefield guides.

Here’s a look inside the grueling guide test that so few pass, despite years—even decades—of trying.

BY JENNY JOHNSTON

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CLAUDIO VAZQUEZ & TOM WOLFF

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O N D EC E M B E R 1 , 2 0 1 2 ,

just before 8 a.m., Larry Korczyk of his home on Hanover Street to Harrisburg Area Community Military Park. The sky was overcast, and a low fog hovered 1,300 monuments—most of which Korczyk had studied in but his mind churned with Gettysburg battle facts: the names cannon fired each day, the blow-by-blow actions of every Civil War. ¶ In the parking lot, Korczyk’s car took its place studying battlefield maps or open books—mostly classics Harry W. Pfanz’s Gettysburg: The Second Day— braced Gettysburg’s licensed battlefield guide written exam—the

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Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, drove the short distance from College, which sits on the edge of Gettysburg National over the battlefield, obscuring the inscriptions on its some detail over the last few years. His eyes were on the road, and ranks of Union and Confederate officers, the number of regiment that participated in the most storied battle of the among dozens of others. Many still had people inside them, like Edwin B. Coddington’s The Gettysburg Campaign or against steering wheels. Like Korczyk, they were there to take first phase of a notoriously tough two-part test that

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many have called the most nerve-wracking and arduous of their lives. have low barriers to entry. Becoming a Gettysburg Gettysburg has long stood apart among Civil War battles. It licensed battlefield guide is a different story. Passwas the conflict’s bloodiest engagement, with 51,000 casualties. It ing the test requires a singular vision and typicalinspired Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech. Many still considly years of studying. er it the turning point of the war. In modern times, the battlefield Two things make phase one of the process— stands apart for another, lesser-known reason: its guide force. Since the written exam—so hard. While a few of its 1915, first the War Department and then the National Park Service roughly 250 questions cover battle basics that even has overseen a fleet of independent contractors—currently 155 men casual buffs might know, most home in on excruand women strong—who together take roughly 230,000 visitors on ciatingly specific details—like which brigade comabout 24,000 tours across the battlefield each year. They are an exmander wore a black bandana during the fightclusive bunch, the only individuals in the world with the legal right ing (Colonel Edward Cross), the highest recorded to conduct tours for hire within the military park without a permit. temperature on the battle’s third day (87 degrees), But joining their ranks is anything but easy. or the length of General Lee’s ambulance wagon One hundred fifty-one people—mostly men—converged on the train back to Virginia (roughly 17 miles). Those community college that morning to take the written exam. There with only a surface knowledge of Gettysburg tend were a lot of beards, a lot of gray hair, and quite a few Gettysburg to leave the exam early—and stunned. “It’s always T-shirts. Larry Korczyk wore a bright blue fleece featuring a tiny the same reaction: ‘Wow, I just got whacked,’” one image of a 19th-century tripod camera and the words “History in guide told me.

Focus” on the front. On a lark, he’d also worn one shoe apiece from While amateurs get eaten alive by the queshis two favorite pairs—one brown, one black—for good luck. tions, Gettysburg “diehards” don’t. Many have Toward the back of the line stood Chris Bagley, a first-time test- studied so hard and for so long that their knowltaker and traveling nurse who spent every non-work weekend in edge of the battle is beyond encyclopedic; they Gettysburg. He’d been studying two hours a night since July. Farther would blurt out “87 degrees” before you even finup was Kevin Curley, an attorney from Chester ished asking the weather quesCounty, Pennsylvania. This was his third attempt. tion, and throw in 12 related First in line was Steve Dunn, an Air Force master facts just because they can’t stop sergeant on the verge of retirement who hoped to themselves. These diehards do make guiding his new career. Dunn looked toward well on the test, even extremely the registration table, where a few dozen battlewell. The problem for them— Determined to pass field guides were now gathering. “All these guys problem No. 2—is the competiare rock stars,” he said, sweeping a hand in front of the test, Larry Korczyk tion. In any given test year, only quit his job and moved him. “I’ve seen their tours on YouTube.” the top 19 or 20 scorers advance to Gettysburg—the The guides he gestured toward were dressed to the next phase of testing—or in full uniform: blue blazers, gray pants with a nine- equivalent of an Elvis “make the cut,” in guide parpoint star badge attached at the belt, and light blue fanatic moving next lance—and you need a near perdoor to Graceland. shirts with a distinctive round patch on the left fect score to be among them. In shoulder, embroidered with the words LICENSED 2010, the last year the test was BATTLEFIELD GUIDE. I asked Dunn how many times he’d taken given, the Park Service took the top 19 scorers. the test. A pained look crossed his face. “This is my fifth try.”

No. 1 got 97.96 percent of the 245 questions correct Welcome to the hardest test in history. (five wrong) and No. 19 got 96.73 percent (eight wrong)—with 17 scorers squeezed in between. It’s the kind of tight, hundredths-of-a-percentage results clustering typically associated with Olympic sporting events—not a test you take to become a n the 150 years since the Battle of Gettysburg, fascination tour guide. By this standard, “passing” the writwith the events that unfolded over those three brutal July days has ten test is always a long shot, even if you know only intensified. Each year, new books get published and fresh inter- more about the battle than George Meade. pretations surface. The Internet teems with Gettysburg chat groups And that’s just the first part. During the secand message boards, where enthusiasts engage in lengthy debates ond phase—the oral examination—candidates over how much water the 72,000 horses at Gettysburg required or get two chances to create and deliver a two-hour Robert E. Lee’s mindset just before Pickett’s Charge. Meanwhile, battlefield tour geared toward the average visiGettysburg National Military Park continues to draw a million and tor. For diehards who revel in battlefield minua half visitors each year, a good many of whom claim to experience tiae, this task can prove immensely difficult. In something almost mystical when they step onto the field. recent years, half of those making it to the oral Luckily, Civil War buffs—and the sizable subset who hold Getexam have “flamed out,” failing both attempts. If tysburg as their mecca—have any number of outlets for their pasthey still want to be guides, they have to wait at sion. They can join a roundtable, read a thousand books, research least two years until the next written test comes their Civil War ancestors, even take up reenacting—all of which around, and start all over again.

I

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Gettysburg resident Larry Korczyk, one of the 151 individuals who took the 2012 licensed battlefield guide exam.

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Clyde Bell, a 30-year employee of the National Park Service, has supervised Gettysburg’s licensed battlefield guide force for nearly two decades.

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There is no limit to how many times you can take Gettysburg’s battlefield guide test. But with the exams spaced years apart, taking it five times, like Steve Dunn, means 10 years of toil for the right to wear the badge. Trying to pass the test can even become an obsession. “The people competing to take this exam all want it so badly. We’re all working so hard,” one repeat test-taker told me. “If you’re really serious about it, you either make that commitment to do everything possible, or there’s no sense it doing it at all. There is no halfway.”

Korczyk married his second wife, Lori, a fellow 2nd Rhode Islander, in a ceremony held on the Gettysburg battlefield. In May 2012, determined to pass the next guide test, he quit his job and the couple moved to Gettysburg—the equivalent of an Elvis fanatic moving next door to Graceland. “I can see Culp’s Hill from my bedroom window, I’m that close,” Korczyk said, referring to one of the field’s fabled battle sites. He started attending Gettysburg seminars and events nearly every week, and got to know some guides. He also took on part-time painting and maintenance work—not enough to topple his study schedule— and drove home every day across the battlefield.

“Often I’ll just sit on the field and go over in my head, what happened here, what happened there,” he said. “I’m living and breathing all of this hisClyde Bell pointed to tory every day now. It’s almost like home field adthe exam—30-odd vantage.” He paused. “Or at least I hope so.” pages that the diehards Korczyk put his logistics background to work now amassing in here is no halfway for in formulating his study schedule. In the weeks Gettysburg would kill Larry Korczyk. Fifty-four years leading up to the test, his routine had all the inold, with warm brown eyes and a to even glance at. “It’s tensity of a Tour de France training program: two going to be a tough test. to three hours of studying in the morning, another beard that’s graying at the chin, And it’s meant to be a Korczyk is affable and easygothree and a half in the afternoon, and a final two tough test. They know ing, the kind of guy you’d seek after dinner. He converted his dining room into a that going into it.” out at a dinner party because war room, its table piled high with books, articles, he’s so approachable. While he’s maps, and notepads. “Sometimes I feel like my always been drawn to history, it wasn’t until the head’s going to explode,” he told me. “Every study technique I can summer after college graduation, when he cracked think of, I’m pulling out.” open a book by Bruce Catton, that his obsession Well, every technique but one. Some prospective guides prepare with the Civil War blossomed. From there, he for the test together, forming study groups that become almost like joined a local Civil War roundtable and started extended families. But Korczyk carved a path on his own. “We all visiting every Civil War site he could find, inknow each other and there’s a camaraderie there,” he said of the cluding far-flung battlefields like Wilson’s Creek, other test-takers he’s met over the years. “But in the same respect, Missouri, and Pea Ridge, Arkansas. But nothing deep down, we know it’s competition. It’s me or him, you know?” gripped him like Gettysburg. “I hate to be cliché about it, but the first time I came here I had my hair standing on end,” he said. “It felt like hallowed ground. I fell in love with it right away.”

He also started reenacting, portraying a huck Burkell was firmly in the study group camp. Sixtysecond sergeant with the New Jersey-based 2nd one, with thick salt-and-pepper hair and a self-conscious smile, Rhode Island, Company D. While the big battles Burkell was a career firefighter in Ohio before joining the U.S. Fire were “awe-inspiring,” what he really liked was the Administration National Fire Academy, located just a few miles living history aspect: setting up camp, giving dem- south of Gettysburg, where he runs a professional development onstrations, and talking to the public. “It’s one program for senior fire officers from around the country. As part of thing to read all this Civil War history. But I love that job, he takes them on staff rides across the battlefield, sharing to share it, I really do.” Becoming a battlefield leadership lessons gleaned from the fighting. But he has to request guide—at Gettysburg, no less—seemed like a pur- a permit from the Park Service every time. If he had a badge, he suit tailor-made for him. He started studying. wouldn’t have to.

Korczyk was living in New Jersey, working as A few days before the exam, Burkell drove me around the batan operations and logistics manager for Williams- tlefield to a few of his favorite spots. His fervor for facts revealed Sonoma, when he took the battlefield guide test itself almost immediately, when I happened to ask if there are bodfor the first time in 2010. He got a 93.5 percent and ies still buried on the field. The last body was found in 1996, he said, ranked in the 30s. Still, he felt encouraged. The near what’s known as the railroad cut. In the 1870s, the Daughters of written tests are never made public, so first-timthe Confederacy had 3,320 Confederate bodies exhumed for reburial ers have only a vague idea what they’re in for. Kodown south. Also, there were 979 unknown Union soldiers buried in rczyk believed he’d made a strong showing. And Gettysburg National Cemetery, and 1,664 buried there whose states just by taking the test, he felt like a man inching were known but not their identities. These were just a few of the toward a more exciting future. thousands of details constantly frontloaded in Burkell’s brain.

That inching soon turned to leaps. In 2011, Despite the demands of his job, Burkell still squeezed in 15 to 20

T

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Burkell didn’t think he could have done anything more to prepare. “It gets to the point where you have to take breaks or it just becomes dysfunctional.” How many days had he taken off from studying in recent months? “None.”

T

he nine-point star badge and embroidered arm patch of the licensed battlefield guide haven’t always drawn such reverence or such wanting.

Guiding in Gettysburg has a long and strange history. It began almost before Lee’s ambulance

ADAMS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, GETTYSBURG, PA (2)

hours of study time each week.

He read reference books constantly, listened to battle-related CDs and podcasts to and from work, and attended Civil War classes and programs around town. He also had “two or three sets” of homespun flash cards, a trove of methodically captured notes, and a series of battlefield maps he’d laminated so that they wouldn’t wear out from overuse.

“After doing this awhile, you accumulate a lot of stuff,” Burkell explained. “There’s just so much information.”

But Burkell’s biggest tool was his study group. Its five An early licensed battlefield members had met in 2008 while guide in full uniform. attending a series of battlefield guide test preparation classes at the local community college. The 2008 test was Burkell’s first, and it hadn’t gone well. The other four men he’d bonded with during class—a CPA, a veterinary oncologist, a lawyer, and an anesthesiologist—didn’t make the cut either, so they decided to study together for the 2010 exam. On that test, Burkell got a 96 percent and ranked No. 22—just three spots away from the top 19. Another in his group was No. 21, and still another was No. 20. All five committed to taking it again. For four years now, they’ve gathered every six or seven weeks for an all-day Gettysburg overload: a morning cramming at one of their homes and an afternoon on the field with a licensed battlefield guide, hired to walk them through a particular segment of the battle—say, the secondday afternoon, or the fighting on Cemetery Hill. They’ve also taken road trips to Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Antietam, and the Wilderness.

Burkell pulled over when we reached the North Carolina Monument. Strolling toward the sculpture—a giant bronze of five clustered Confederates gripped in battle—he let loose another series of facts. The monument was dedicated in 1929 and sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, the artist behind Mount Rushmore. In fact, Borglum was working on Mount Rushmore when he was approached by Civil War veterans from North Carolina. After quoting the sitting governor of North Carolina’s speech at the dedication ceremony, Burkell mentioned that North Carolina had more casualties at Gettysburg than any other Confederate state.

“How many?” I asked.

Burkell paused, unsure.

Back at the car, he grabbed a book called Gettysburg by the Numbers from his backseat and flipped through its pages until he found what he wanted. North Carolina’s total strength at Gettysburg had been 13,980 men; 6,127, or 44 percent, were counted killed, wounded, captured, or missing. “That’s a possible test question right there,” Burkell said, tapping a finger on the page. “‘Of the Confederate states, which had the highest casualties?’ By percentage it’s Florida. But numerically, it was North Carolina.” He flashed a sheepish smile. “That doesn’t hurt to know. That could come up.”

There was always more to learn, more to memorize. But

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Guiding at Gettysburg began soon after the battle ended and became a licensed profession in 1915. Above: Guide Charles Sheads stands alongside a car of tourists on the Gettysburg battlefield in the early 1900s.

wagon train started creaking southward, with local townspeople escorting loved ones over the field. By the early 1890s, Gettysburg was attracting 150,000 visitors a year, and “perhaps as many as fifty individuals were engaged in the more-orless permanent occupation of ‘Battlefield Guide,’” writes guide Fred Hawthorne in A Peculiar Institution: A History of the Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guides, a surprisingly gripping 11-part series published on the Association of Licensed Battlefield Guides website.

But as visitation increased, opportunists swooped in, many of whom cared far less about Pickett than about filling their pockets. These

rogue guides swarmed travelers as they disembarked trains. The practice of leaping in front of out-of-state cars to beseech drivers to stop for a tour became so common that the town passed an ordinance banning any guide from stepping more than two feet into the street. Unfortunately, the tours they peddled were often even more alarming than their solicitation strategies. Tourists were regularly appalled at their theatrical and fantastical inaccuracy. “The visitor arrives and is immediately surrounded by guides soliciting patronage,” wrote a man from Pittsburgh, in one of many firsthand accounts turned up by Hawthorne. “Some of these are good, but most of them are poor and illiterate…. On my last visit with some friends the guide took us to the angle first instead of last, and mixed everything else up until, instead of leaving well pleased and impressed, you leave with no clear comprehension of the event except that

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Licensed battlefield guides, who number 155 and rarely leave the force, are a tight-knit group, often spending their off hours together discussing the finer points of the battle.

Pictured here on the Gettysburg battlefield are, from left, guides John Zervas, Jim Hessler, and Rich Kohr.

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there was a lot of men killed.”

Inundated with complaints and fed up with the Wild West atmosphere, the War Department eventually proposed a bill to regulate Gettysburg guiding. Beginning in 1915, anyone who wanted to lead tours for hire would need to pass both a written and an oral test to obtain a license. Those caught giving a paid tour without one could be kicked off the field or even arrested. The guide test—and guide force’s monopoly on for-fee tours—had begun.

Unfortunately, regulating the guides didn’t immediately stop their practice of ambushing motorists. (The new uniforms and badges caused many unsuspecting visitors to mistake them for cops and dutifully pull over.) As the National Park Service, which inherited the park and its guides in 1933, soon discovered, licensed guides were also remarkably adept at protecting their turf; they managed to squash most of the Park Service’s attempts to alter their “peculiar” system or infringe on their exclusive rights in any way, often taking their complaints straight to Congress. But over time, things shifted. The guide force professionalized. A system to randomly assign guides to tours replaced the practice of soliciting visitors street-side, and events like the battle’s 1963 centennial celebrations drew a more serious set to the force. Rogue guides were replaced by diehards. Today, there isn’t a person on the force who isn’t an all-out Gettysburg expert. Not a single guide who ever tires of talking about cannon, regiments, or the death of General John Reynolds, or who doesn’t feel a rush of pride every time they pull on the uniform. As guide Wayne Motts put it to me: “It’s one of the greatest achievements and honors of my life, to be the keeper of the memory of the people who died here.”

Today’s guides take field trips together. They chat about the Wheatfield like other people talk about the weather. They take turns giving formal talks to one another with titles like “For the Last Time on Earth: The Life and Death of 1st Sgt. Aaron T. McNaghten, Co. D, 62nd OVI,” and write detailed articles on everything from “Getting to Know the XI Corps: 75th Ohio Infantry (Part 1)” to “Calculating a Conundrum: Pettigrew’s Division on July 3rd: One Line or Two?” Knowledge of Gettysburg is their currency, and they revel in growing and exchanging it.

None of them does it for the money. Fulltime guides are required to lead a minimum of 175

tours per year, part-timers no less than 90. (The force’s 50 emeritus guides—those who have served for 25 years or are over 68 and have guided for at least seven—have no requirements). But at just $55 per car tour and $125 per bus tour, that hardly adds up to a lucrative living, and the force is heavy with retirees and emeritus guides for this reason. Most younger guides either do it part-time while holding down other careers or, if full-time, pick up extra jobs in the off-season to supplement their tour earnings. “Everyone here could make a whole lot more money doing almost anything else if they wanted to,” said guide John Zervas. But they don’t want to—and that was the point. Sue Boardman ditched a 23-year career as an emergency room nurse to become a battlefield guide. Fred Hawthorne was an Air Force intelligence analyst, then a high school history teacher, before finding his way to guiding. Zervas spent 25 years in marketing on Wall Street before chucking it all for his badge. Their former colleagues didn’t care that they knew all the names of General Dan Sickles’ staff members. Their new ones do. Now, that knowledge earns them respect. It’s part of why almost no one ever leaves the force—and why the Park Service rarely needs new guides. As one insider put it: “About the only way a guide gives up their license is through death.”

Jim Tate was testament to that. At age 94, he was the oldest member of the force and had been guiding since 1951. I took a tour with Tate, a World War II veteran, a few days before the guide test.

He grew up in Gettysburg, he told me, and could remember when some of the town’s picket fences were still scarred by bullet holes. He also remembered the chaos of Gettysburg Square during the Depression era, with men standing on street corners yelling, “Battlefield guide!” at passing cars. “I didn’t realize that years later I would be doing the same thing,” said Tate, who struck me as sharper than most 70-year-olds. When Tate started out, guides still wore olive drab uniforms, with a black tie and a garrison hat. A tour cost $3 or $4.

In July 1938—the Battle of Gettysburg’s 75th anniversary— nearly a quarter of a million people gathered at Oak Hill to hear President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicate the Eternal Peace Light Memorial. Tate was there. So were about 1,800 Civil War veterans. “They were wearing uniforms, some in gray, some in blue.

Long beards, sideburns, medals,” Tate recalled. “You’re just thinking, these fellas fought in the Civil War. They saved our country.”

After the ceremony, Tate followed the veterans to the railroad station—the same station where Lincoln had disembarked on the eve of the Gettysburg Address. At the back of the last train car stood a Confederate veteran and a Union veteran, waving to the crowd. “I thought, look at that, just fading into history,” Tate told me. “People think the Civil War was so long ago, but I can tell you it wasn’t.”

Tate had shaken hands with Battle of Gettysburg survivors, and his fellow guides revered him for that. He inspired them in another way as well. “Till I’m as old as Jim Tate, if I live that long,” Fred Hawthorne said, when I asked him how long he would guide.

I heard the same thing from seven or eight others. If Tate was their connection to the past, he also represented the future they wanted for themselves: in their 90s, still sharp, and still guiding.

About six weeks after we spoke, Tate died suddenly. He had been a fixture at Gettysburg National Military Park for more than

Passing the test is always a long shot, even if you know more about the battle than George Meade.

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60 years, as dependable a presence as Little Round Top. His passing signaled the end of an era. On a blustery winter morning, Tate was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Gettysburg’s civilian burial ground since 1854. Lining both sides of the path from hearse to grave were about 80 licensed battlefield guides, in full uniform, there to honor a veteran—of war, of guiding, of life—for his legacy of service. “It was a good tribute,” Fred Hawthorne said. Tate would have been delighted.

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LBG 101: HOW IT WORKS THERE ARE MANY WAYS to experience the Gettys-

burg battlefield. You can take an audio tour, download a growing number of podcasts and battlefield apps, or sign up for one of the National Park Service’s free ranger-led interpretive programs, which focus on specific aspects of the battle. But one of the best ways to grasp the overall story of what happened there on July 1-3, 1863, is to hire a licensed battlefield guide.

WHAT THEY DO:

Guides conduct visitors around the Civil War’s most visited and well-marked battlefield, often by bus and occasionally by horse or Segway. However, the vast majority of tours are conducted by car—your car. Your guide will meet you inside the Visitor Center, politely ask for your keys, then drive you around the field. Using the battlefield as a living map, they’ll describe key moments of the battle and share real-life stories of heroism and tragedy. Even Gettysburg “diehards” will learn something. Most tours last two hours.

WHO THEY ARE:

Since 1915, there have been fewer than 570 licensed battlefield guides. Today’s force numbers 155, about 15 of whom are women. Guides range in age from late 20s to late 80s, but the majority are in their 50s and 60s. Most guides have specialties and can be hired for customized tours (some guides would be happy to spend a whole day on, say, Little Round Top, or Union artillery units). The force’s most prolific guide is John Fuss, now in his 80s, who averages more than 700 tours a year. The next closest guide, who is much younger, does about 530 tours annually.

THREE WAYS TO HIRE THEM:

1. To reserve a guide at least three days in advance, contact the park’s reservation system (877-874-2478; reservations@gettysburgfoundation. org). Guides can also be reserved by name or by specialty (Peach Orchard, infantry, etc.).

2. You can also call the Association of Licensed Battlefield Guides to book an upcoming tour (717-337-1709).

3. Otherwise, guides are available on a first-come, first-serve basis at the Visitor Center reservation desk.

Note: It is easier to book a guide in the morning, so show up early. Car tours cost $65 (of which $55 goes to the guide; tips welcome). Van tours cost $90, and bus tours for 16+ people cost $135. In summertime, commercial bus tours with a licensed guide aboard leave regularly from the Visitor Center ($30 for adults, $18 for children 6-12, free for kids 5 and under).

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC KULIN

obody knows more about what it takes to become a licensed battlefield guide than Clyde Bell. A compact man with graying reddish hair, a square jaw, and intense blue eyes, Bell has worked for the National Park Service for 30 years. For the last 17, he has served as Gettysburg’s guide supervisor, overseeing all aspects of guide testing and licensing. A few days before the test, I popped into his office. Paintings of Gettysburg battle scenes crowded its walls, and Bell’s desk overflowed with paperwork. Sifting through it, he found the stapled stack he was looking for and held it up. “This is it—this is the test,” said Bell. I said I was surprised it wasn’t in a vault somewhere. He laughed. “Maybe it should be.”

Over the last two years, about 250 people had contacted Bell about taking the 2012 exam. He’d sent each a letter designed to deter all but the diehards. (“You should be aware that becoming an LBG is not an easy undertaking, nor is it quickly accomplished….

Please give this serious thought when pursuing your desire to become a Licensed Battlefield Guide.”) The letter turned away about 100 people. Still, the test always draws its share of buffs who don’t heed the warning. “They’ve read The Killer Angels several times and seen the movie Gettysburg, and think they can pass it,” Bell said, shaking his head.

As overseer of all things guide-test-related, Bell was personally responsible for assembling the written exam. The questions— chosen from a vast database of possibilities—change each time but are always a mix of fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, matching, and true/false. Test-takers also need to identify about a dozen battlefield monuments (with inscriptions blurred), put names to the photos of Civil War-era personalities, and identify natural and man-made features on a battlefield map. In recent years, Bell has broadened the test to include questions about prewar and postwar politics, the experiences of women and African Americans during the conflict, and other Civil War battles. “Guides have to be prepared for visitors’ questions about all aspects of the war—not just what happened at Gettysburg,” he remarked. So, then, do test-takers.

Diehards like Korczyk and Burkell don’t worry much about the map, the monuments, or the photo identifications. But they do fear Bell’s questions about the wider war—especially other Civil War battles—and the multi-part fill-in-the-blank questions he seems to favor. (Doubly worrisome are multi-part fill-in-the-blank questions about other Civil War battles.) And they always look out for trick questions, especially in the true/false section. In the six tests that Bell had administered—the upcoming test would be his seventh— nobody had ever achieved a perfect score.

Now, test-takers had a few new things to worry about. Bell had made it known that he planned to retire soon. Whether his replacement will offer the test again in two years, nobody knows. More

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A group of visitors gathers to listen to their licensed battlefield guide on a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield.

alarming was the rampant rumor that the 2012 test would be the hardest anyone had ever seen.

Bell and some of the guides were concerned that repeat test-takers were getting too comfortable with the predictable format, the rumor went, and that the top scores were too crammed together.

A few months before the test, Bell had asked the guides to come up with some new questions— something he’s never done before. They’d handed him 68 pages’ worth.

Bell pointed to the exam—30-odd pages that the diehards now amassing in Gettysburg would kill to even glance at. “It’s going to be a tough test,” he said. “And it’s meant to be a tough test.

They know that going into it.”

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ot every would-be guide has the advantage of living locally. Three days before the test, Mike Rupert drove the 185 miles from his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, eager to squeeze in a few study days on the battlefield. With him, he’d hauled two suitcases of books, a duffel filled with printouts and papers, a laptop, and two large framed posters showing the “order of battle”—essentially, a detailed family-tree-like representation

of the command structure and units of the opposing armies. Having all these resources at hand would help with a problem he’d dubbed “regimental drift”—when reading about a particular detail of the battle leads you to wonder about another detail that you then must compulsively look up. It was rare that Rupert read anything without catching the “drift.”

Forty-seven years old and a mechanic by trade, Rupert is wiry and soft-spoken, with center-parted sandy-blond hair and a clipped mustache that dips down at the corners, a style I’ve seen before in Civil War soldier daguerreotypes. On my first morning in Gettysburg, I chatted with him over eggs and orange juice at the Doubleday Inn, the charming B&B, located on the battlefield itself, where we were both staying. Rupert’s first visit to Gettysburg came in 2001, during a family trip. At the time, he knew “absolutely zero” about Gettysburg and wasn’t even a Civil War buff. But when the family stopped at the Pennsylvania State Memorial, a giant monument listing the names of all soldiers from Pennsylvania regiments who fought in the battle, Rupert just stood there, awestruck. “My wife said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’” Rupert recalled. “It was those 34,000 names, all from my state. That’s when I realized there was something else here. The field just grabbed me.”

Rupert’s Civil War library, which didn’t exist in 2001, now occupies three walls in his house. He also spends nearly all his vacation time in Gettysburg, studying the field and daydreaming about earning his badge. “Being able to tell people the story here and show them the field would be an honor,” he said. “It would mean more than fixing your brakes.” Rupert took the test for the first time in 2008 and scored an 84 percent. In 2010, he got a 94.69 percent and

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tied for No. 28—several spots ahead of Larry Korczyk. scheduling and conducting oral exams. So in 2002, As Rupert and I finished breakfast, another Doubleday-dwelling Bell started offering the test more frequently—every test-taker—Dave Clark, a tall, thin tax attorney from California— two years—and capped the number of people makambled in and sat down. I asked him how many times he’s taken the ing the cut at 19 or 20. That’s when the competition exam. “It feels like 14,” he said, digging into his eggs. Actually, this kicked into high gear. would be his fourth try. Last time he was tied with Rupert at No. 28.

But back in the days of 85 percent, Bell had Over the years, Clark has gone to epic lengths to erase some of the noticed something. Those who scored lower on the disadvantage of living so far from Gettysburg. In order to attend the test—closer to 85 than to 100—were often more efsame test-prep classes that Burkell and his group had a few years fective guides. “They just had the personality and earlier, he’d taken red-eyes back and forth from California—two could talk to the level of visitor who comes here,” round-trips per week—through most of the summer. he explained. They also passed their oral exams at The two men talked about their study plans while Clark fina higher rate. Now, that entire subset of exceptional ished breakfast. Eventually, Clark put on his jacket and pulled future guides is locked out of the system, unable to a colorful striped beanie onto his head. Over the next few days, advance unless they happen to memorize the numI would spot that beanie at least a half dozen times around the ber of 5th Maine Monument cannonballs. If the test battlefield, as Clark climbed through woods acts as an exclusionary device, or stood in the middle of a meadow, scrutinizthen it could be excluding some ing a heavily highlighted book or just revelof the very people who would be ing in being on the field that he reads so much best at the job. about from afar. I asked him if he felt ready. He Still, despite these shortcomshrugged. “I think of it this way,” Clark said, ings, nobody has come up with a zipping his jacket. “There are about 10,000 quesbetter alternative. And there is no tions they could ask. I just have to figure out arguing that the process contin“I think of it this which 250 it’s going to be.” ues to yield outstanding guides. way,” said test-taker “As the testing and the competiDave Clark. “There tion became keener and keener, are about 10,000 THAT A TEST-TAKER’S FATE can come down to I think the level of who we were questions they could whether they know, say, how much it cost to exgetting as licensed guides got ask. I just have to hume and rebury a Union soldier’s body in 1863 higher and higher,” Hartwig said. figure out which 250 ($1.59) has an absurdity to it that is not lost on “When I think of the licensed it’s going to be.”

Scott Hartwig, the lead historian at Gettysburg Naguides today versus when I first tional Military Park and the brain behind its many came to Gettysburg, there’s no ranger-led interpretative programs, a free complement to the feecomparison. We may like to reminisce about the based tours led by battlefield guides. Hartwig thinks hard test quesgood old days, but the good old days are right now.” tions are fine, but within limits. “These guys need to know their stuff about the battle and the history of the park,” he said. “But now it’s become, do you happen to know how many cannonballs are on top of the 5th Maine Monument”—which doesn’t strike Hartwig as crucial battlefield knowledge.

Ds out, and no cellphones!” bellowed Allen Guelzo, professor of history and director of the Civil one of the guides manning the registration desk War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College, also puzzles over on test day. “H through Z on the right, A through the written test’s focus on extreme detail, likening it to a gigantic H on the left!” It was 8:30 a.m., 30 minutes before game of Trivial Pursuit. “The exam targets very finicky stuff, most the start of the written exam. The line moved of which would never get meaningfully deployed on a tour.” Plus, quickly, and test-takers sorted themselves into a he added, many of the test’s “facts” aren’t hard data at all. “The dozen or so garishly painted, windowless classexam assumes that there is one authentic narrative of the battle, rooms. Earlier, some had visited the monument one authentic sequence of timing, one authentic placement of to the 140th New York Infantry’s Colonel Patrick units—and there isn’t,” Guelzo said. “I can give you five complete“Paddy” O’Rourke on Little Round Top, rubbing ly conflicting scenarios of how an event unfolded during the battle, his nose for good luck like others might kiss the and each could be perfectly valid. But that doesn’t work out well Blarney Stone. The Doubleday innkeepers had on an exam. You can’t turn that into a multiple choice question.” handed Clark and Rupert dog biscuits to lay at Guide supervisor Clyde Bell often ponders a different dilemma. In the feet of the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry’s lucky the 1990s, the guide test was offered every three or four years, and anycanine mascot, Sallie, depicted on its monument. one scoring above 85 percent would automatically advance to the oral Larry Korczyk, of course, had pulled on his misexam. But with the release of the movie Gettysburg (1993) and the swarm matched shoes. Now, he fiddled nervously with his of events surrounding the battle’s 135th anniversary, the test’s popularNo. 2 pencils, and waited. ity spiked. In 1987, 50 people took it. In 1994, it was 200—a whopping 85 What none of them knew, in those quiet minof whom qualified for the oral exam, creating a multi-year backlog for utes leading up to start time, was } CONT. ON P. 94

“I

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Test-takers huddle over their papers during the 2012 written exam.

A group of licensed battlefield guides gathers around a copy of the exam while the test is in progress.

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By

ALLEN C. G U E LZ O

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

DID DANIEL SICKLES, THE UNION’S MOST NOTORIOUS GENERAL, SAVE THE DAY FOR THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC AT GETTYSBURG? THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED YOU TO BELIEVE.

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PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

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AJOR GENERAL Daniel Edgar Sickles was an American original—in the very worst sense. He achieved his apex of notoriety—his detractors would have choked to call it fame—on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, when without authorization he placed the III Corps of the Army of the Potomac smack in the path of 25,000 elated Confederates and watched the Rebels grind his corps to dust. But Gettysburg was only the tallest peak in Mad Dan’s range of outrages, which included trying to destroy the reputation of Gettysburg victor George Gordon Meade, fomenting war with Spain, and committing embezzlement, fraud, and even one outright murder. From all

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offenses, however, Sickles walked away free and clean, adored by those who should have known better. Even Mark Twain wrote that Sickles “always seems modest and unexasperating” and “never made an ungenerous remark about anybody.” When it comes to the art of the con, bamboozling America’s skeptic-in-chief may be the ultimate achievement.¹ Twain’s misplaced trust is a good marker of the peculiar spell that Dan Sickles was capable of casting. Born in 1819—or was it 1824, 1826, or another of the alternative birth dates he regularly handed out?—in New York City, where his father’s fortune in real estate guaranteed him the finest tutors and a limitless bankroll, Sickles was a spoiled child who matured into a suave, mustachioed, and pathological liar. He studied law, but his passion was politics, which in New York City meant Democratic politics. He made his first political speech on behalf of Martin Van Buren, took a seat in the New York state assembly, and got himself elected to Congress. Along the way, he became a genius of the glad hand and an organ grinder of boodle, “loved more sincerely, and hated more heartily, than any man of his day,” as Harper’s Weekly put it.²

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Daniel Sickles fatally shoots an unarmed Philip Barton Key in the streets of Washington in this Harper’s Weekly illustration.

Sickles had flown into a rage after discovering that his young wife, Teresa Bagioli, and Key (both pictured opposite) were having an affair.

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Not for the first or last time would Sickles hear a no and pretend he had heard a yes.

In 1852, at age 33 (if that birth date is reliable), Sickles married a “ravishing” 16-year-old Italian beauty named Teresa Bagioli. Any eyebrows raised by this mésalliance were even higher in 1859 when, after renting a lavish home on Lafayette Square in Washington, he caught Teresa in flagrante with Philip Barton Key, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and the son of Francis Scott Key of “Star-Spangled Banner” fame. Enraged, Sickles pursued the unarmed Key and shot him to death after a clumsy scuffle on the curb across from the White House.³ This was not the sort of publicity Sickles craved. A high-powered legal team, headed by soon-to-be Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, persuaded a jury that Teresa’s infidelity had induced a fit of temporary insanity. The jurors deliberated just 70 minutes before declaring Sickles not guilty. Astoundingly, three months later Sickles performed a moral somersault and reconciled with Teresa. The collective jaw of the nation dropped, and Sickles found himself shunned even on the floor of Congress, where he “was left to himself as if he had smallpox.” He prudently decided not to tempt public contempt by running for re-election, and he might have dropped soundlessly into the footnotes of American political history if not for the Civil War.⁴

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S A LOYAL Democrat, Sickles was likely expected to fall in with the fellowship of New York City’s Lincoln-haters: August Belmont, Fernando Wood, Manton Marble.

Instead, Sickles bound himself to President Abraham Lincoln and the Union cause, and set about

recruiting the five-regiment Excelsior Brigade. The government happily attached them to the Army of the Potomac, but Congress balked at commissioning the likes of Sickles to command them. In 1861, however, Lincoln needed to rally all the bipartisan support he could muster, and the following spring the Senate very reluctantly confirmed Sickles as a brigadier general.

Dan Sickles may have been the very epitome of Herman Melville’s shifty confidence man, but Mark Twain was just one of the “judicious men who rate Sickles very high.” Another was Union general Joseph Hooker, who thought Sickles a “gallant leader” and an “intrepid chief” and “one of the greatest soldiers of the day.” Sickles’ Excelsior Brigade was attached to Hooker’s division in the III Corps during the Peninsula Campaign, and when Hooker took command of the I Corps before Antietam, Sickles took over Hooker’s old division. When Hooker was given command of the Army of the Potomac in 1863, Sickles was rewarded with command of the III Corps and a major general’s commission as “an ideal soldier of volunteers.”⁵ Sickles’ reinvention of himself as an “ideal soldier” was abruptly stalled by the collapse of his patron Hooker during the Union defeat at Chancellorsville in May 1863. Chancellorsville, curiously, was Sickles’ one moment of genuine tactical aplomb: He had spotted the movement conducted by Lieutenant General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson that crushed Hooker’s right flank, only to have his warning waved away, and he advised Hooker not to evacuate the high ground at Hazel Grove, which the Confederates promptly converted into a perfect artillery platform. That, however, made no impression on Hooker’s successor, George Gordon Meade, a sharp-tempered West Pointer with a distaste for politicians in general and Sickles in particular.

And as a Democrat, Meade viewed Sickles’ support of Lincoln as little better than a sell-out. Meade wished that “the rulers on both sides” would “terminate this unnatural contest,” and he frankly hoped that “the ultras” would somehow “be repudiated, & the masses of conservative & moderate men may compromise & settle the difficulty.”⁶ Meade’s appointment to command the Army of the Potomac on June 28, 1863, caught nearly everyone by surprise, especially since the army was in hot pursuit of Robert E. Lee, who with his Army of Northern Virginia was launching the war’s second Confederate invasion of the North. Sickles was not only surprised, but apprehensive. He “knew [Meade] was hostile, dating from several incidents in the Chancellorsville campaign.” For his part, the less Meade saw of Sickles, the happier he was. Meade’s first two communications to Sickles had been nasty little reprimands for “the very slow movement of your corps yesterday,” and he pushed any thoughts of Sickles aside by placing the III Corps under the temporary “wing” com-

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OT THAT Meade was looking for advice from Dan Sickles. As the lead elements of the III Corps came up the Emmitsburg road to Gettysburg in the twilight, the only task Meade had in mind for Sickles was to shuffle the III Corps into place on Cemetery Ridge, the low crest that ran southward from Cemetery Hill. This put Sickles on the army’s left flank and out of sight, which tempted Sickles to conclude that Meade was deliberately shunting his corps away from its piece of the action.

When Sickles’ last brigade arrived on the morning of July 2, they jangled Sickles’ memories of Chancellorsville by reporting a brushup against Confederate pickets somewhere beyond Sickles’ front. Determined not to be lulled into passivity, Sickles sent “a detachment of 100 sharpshooters” to the west side of the Emmitsburg road “with directions to feel the enemy.”⁹ When the sharpshooters did indeed collide with Confederate skirmishers, Sickles became frantic, convinced that Meade had left him alone in the path of a Confederate landslide. “I went in person to headquarters,” Sickles testified, “and reported the facts and circumstances which led me to believe that an attack would be made” on the III Corps, but he got nothing but a dismissive instruction to tie his right flank to the II Corps behind Cemetery Hill and his left flank to a conical hill that would become known as Little Round Top. When Sickles beseeched Meade to at least come over and have a look for himself, Meade irritably replied that “his engagements did

not permit him to do that.”¹⁰ Sickles countered the rebuff with another request: If Meade had no plans for the III Corps, could Sickles at least move his men around to suit his own judgment? Yes, Meade snapped impatiently, within reasonable limits “any ground … you choose to occupy I leave to you.” Sickles also wrested assent from Meade to take the Army of the Potomac’s artillery chief, Henry Hunt, back to the III Corps position.¹¹ As Sickles explained to Hunt, Cemetery Ridge declined imperceptibly by almost 50 feet as it snaked south from Cemetery Hill, so that at the point where the III Corps was bivouacked, his troops were actually sitting not on a ridge but in “a low marshy swale.” Not only was it in “a hole” compared to Cemetery Hill, it was actually 60 feet lower than a peach orchard they could see out at the Emmitsburg road. Sickles’ solution would be to post his junior division commander, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, along the Emmitsburg road to secure the “commanding ground” down to the peach orchard, but then severely angle his other division (under David Bell Birney) back almost 90 degrees to trace a line toward Little Round Top. Could he do that? Hunt hesitated. “So far as it was a line for troops to occupy,” Hunt diplomatically replied, “it was a very good line.” But, Hunt warned, Sickles “should await orders from General Meade” before making such a dramatic move.¹² Not for the first or last time would Sickles hear a no and pretend he had heard a yes. So the orders went out, and the divisions “advanced in a brilliant line,” as the 15-piece brass band of the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry thumped away to mark the time. A slightly bewildered Andrew Humphreys “sent out working parties” to take down “all the fences” and pieced out his three brigades along the Emmitsburg road.

Birney’s division had its three brigades distributed from the peach orchard back to a stony ridge and then down to a massive, forbidding rock outcropping known as Devil’s Den. “The eye beheld battery and brigade extended from point to point,” wrote an officer in Humphreys’ di-

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mand of John Reynolds.⁷ However, it was Sickles whom Reynolds turned to when fighting broke out on the morning of July 1 west of Gettysburg. “Tell General Sickles I think he had better come up” was one of Reynolds’ last orders before a Confederate skirmisher’s bullet killed him, and Sickles had most of the III Corps on the road to Gettysburg by mid-day.

Sickles rode up to Gettysburg in advance of his corps, arriving at the battered Union position on Cemetery Hill just after dark. Meade himself arrived shortly thereafter, and Sickles chimed in with the army’s other corps commanders to recommend that Meade hold their ground at Gettysburg. “It is a good place to fight from, general,” Sickles announced. Meade, who had been ready to fight from positions prepared farther south behind Pipe Creek, grudgingly agreed. “I am glad to hear you say so, gentlemen, for it is too late to leave it.”⁸

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Given the location of his headquarters—the Widow Leister’s cottage, on the reverse slope of Cemetery Hill and pictured here—Army of the Potomac commander George Gordon Meade (opposite page) could not observe, and therefore was among the last to know about, Daniel Sickles’ brazen redeployment of his III Corps.

vision, full of “moving columns and gay banners.”

But there were so few men available to cover the necessary yardage that Sickles, as an afterthought, sent off an appeal to the artillery reserve for any extra batteries they could spare.¹³ Astonished staffers in the neighboring II Corps stood up to offer commentary on “the comparative merits of the line” Sickles was acquiring.

Winfield Scott Hancock, the commander of the II Corps, remarked, “Gentlemen, that is a splendid advance” and “beautiful to look at.” But he could not imagine that Meade had sanctioned this

parade, and he predicted that “those troops will be coming back again very soon.” Actually, George Meade was one of the last people to learn about Sickles’ maneuver, and this was largely because his impromptu headquarters at the Widow Leister’s ramshackle cottage sat on the reverse slope of Cemetery Hill, out of sight of the Emmitsburg road. At 3 p.m., one of his staff strolled in and asked casually whether Meade was aware that Sickles had re-deployed the entire III Corps out to the Emmitsburg road. Meade erupted in Vesuvian proportions, and dispatched an aide to demand that Sickles report to him for an explanation.¹⁴ Sickles at first refused. He “sat upon his white horse, received the papers,” and told the courier, “Say to General Meade that it will

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As Sickles was eased onto a stretcher, he had the presence of mind to ask, “Won’t you be kind enough to light a cigar for me?” be impossible for me to report at his Hd Quarters at this time as this battle will be precipitated upon us before I could reach his Hd Quarters.” Meade furiously sent off a second demand, and this time, Sickles obeyed. But as he went, “a shell passed over our heads, bursting in air far beyond…. The battle had Commenced.” When Sickles finally arrived at headquarters, Meade stopped him from dismounting, and told him to turn around back to his corps. Meade then followed, outracing his hastily mounted staffers to join Sickles at the peach orchard.¹⁵ Disregarding the artillery rounds sailing over their heads, Meade angrily told Sickles where his corps ought to have been—“between the left of the Second Corps and Little Round Top.” Sickles objected lamely, “I have made these dispositions to the best of my judgment.”

And he had occupied the high ground. “General Sickles, this is in some respects higher ground than that to the rear,” Meade sliced in, slamming Sickles with sarcasm, “but there is still higher ground in front of you, and if you keep on advancing you will find constantly higher ground all the way to the mountains.” Very well, Sickles stiffly agreed, he would “be happy to modify” his position “according to your views.” Too late, Meade retorted. Artillery was the overture to infantry, and Confederate infantry would be on Sickles’ doorstep before any orders to fall back could be distributed. “No,” Meade said, “I will send you the Fifth Corps, and you may send for support from the Second Corps.” Then Meade rode off in “a heavy shower of shells.”

From the wood line in the distance, long lines of Confederate infantry were stepping out and dressing their ranks.¹⁶ FROM THAT MOMENT, Sickles lost all effective control over the ground he was supposed to be defending. The Confederate attack swept toward Devil’s Den, overrunning one of Birney’s brigades and lapping up the slopes of Little Round Top; more Confederates stove in Birney’s other brigade protecting the stony ridge, and still more of them flattened the remainder of the III Corps’ line along the Emmitsburg road. Only the dramatic intervention of the II Corps and the V Corps—and the fall of night—saved the Army of the Potomac from a second Chancellorsville, and Dan Sickles might have had little to look forward to at George Meade’s hands but a court-martial, which would have exceeded the Key murder trial in publicity.

Characteristically, though, Dan converted this liability into his most heroic endorsement, for at about 6 p.m., while he sat astride his horse under a swamp oak behind farmer Abraham Trostle’s barn, a flying piece of Confederate ordnance cracked the bones of his right leg just below the knee. No one has ever known exactly what actually hit Sickles, and even Sickles was not sure. “I never knew I was hit,” he later recalled, and only realized something was wrong when he became “conscious of dampness along the lower part of my right leg.” Pulling his leg out of his “high-top boots,” Sickles “was surprised to see it dripping with blood.” As shock began to set in, Sickles slid off his saddle and hobbled painfully to the

side of the Trostle barn, calling “Quick, quick! Get something and tie it up before I bleed to death.”

A musician on stretcher duty rushed up with a “turnkey” tourniquet and managed to stop the bleeding.¹⁷ The musician, William Bullard of the 70th New York Infantry, thought Sickles had only sustained “a compound fracture of the leg.” But it looked much worse—“so badly shattered that it hung merely by a shred,” according to Thomas Cook of the New York Herald. Private Bullard poured some brandy for Sickles, which seemed to revive him a little, and as Sickles was eased onto a stretcher, he had the presence of mind to ask Bullard, “Won’t you be kind enough to light a cigar for me?” Bullard fumbled around inside Sickles’ coat, found a cigar case, bit off the end of a “small” cigar, then lit it up and “placed it in the Gen. mouth.” The ambulance stopped at a twostory brick house on the Baltimore Pike, and on an improvised surgical table the III Corps’ chief medical director, Thomas Simms, chloroformed Sickles and amputated the butchered leg. “How much missed is his clear-sighted direction and his all-pervading energy,” wept the adoring New York Times. Those who did not adore Sickles had a different interpretation: that Sickles had been only slightly wounded, but ordered the amputation to engender sympathy and “save him from the mess he got in,” as Union general Alexander Webb put it.¹⁸

S

ICKLES SURVIVED the amputation of his leg surprisingly well, convalescing exuberantly in Washington and filling the ears of politicians, all the way up to President Lincoln, with tales of how the III Corps had saved the Army of the Potomac from sure destruction. Word of this came back to a stony-faced Meade, and when Sickles returned to the army on October 18, expecting

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Horses killed during the Battle of Gettysburg litter Abraham Trostle’s farm.

Sickles was behind the barn pictured here when he received the wound that would lead to the amputation of his leg.

restoration to command, Meade made it clear that under no imaginable circumstances would he ever put Sickles in charge of anything in the Army of the Potomac.¹⁹ He did not foresee Sickles’ considerable powers of retaliation. Sickles began assiduously poisoning as many minds as he could on Congress’ Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, whispering that Meade had been on the verge of abandoning Gettysburg on July 2 for Pipe Creek, a branch of the Monocacy River that Meade had originally selected as the concentration point for the Army of the Potomac, when Sickles forced the issue by moving forward to the Emmitsburg

road. And unfortunately for the Army of the Potomac’s commander, Meade really had been strangely negligent about the threat to his left flank on July 2, and he had, in fact, favored a pullout for Pipe Creek at a council of war that night. “There is no doubt,” XII Corps commander Henry Slocum insisted, that if Meade had had his way “the army on the third of July would have been in full retreat,” and the Independence Day that followed it would have been “the darkest day ever known to our country.” Samuel Wylie Crawford, who commanded a division in the V Corps, assured Sickles in 1886 that a statement by “a staff officer of Gen. Meade … goes far to establish your assertions in regard to Meade’s determination to leave Gettysb[urg],” but the officer feared for his career, and nothing was ever made public.²⁰ In February 1864, the Joint Committee (after } CONT. ON P. 99

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JOHN C. WHITE 2ND LIEUT. + 49TH NEW YORK INFANTRY After the battle, White was among those who pursued the Army of Northern Virginia on its retreat, clashing with the Rebels’ rear guard at Fairfield, Pennsylvania, and generally harassing the enemy all the way back to Virginia.

The following year, White was captured in action; the last record of him is as a prisoner of war in Macon, Georgia, in October 1864.

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OF

Gettysburg

BY RONA LD S. C ODDI N GT ON

More than 160,000 men were involved in the massive clash of armies at Gettysburg. On the following pages are the images—and stories—of a select few who were swept up in the epic engagement.

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Frederick Waugh Smith 1ST LIEUT. + CONFEDERATE STATES ARMY

FA C E S o f

GETTYSBURG

Smith served as an aide-de-camp to his father, Confederate general William “Extra Billy” Smith, a former Virginia governor who was re-elected to the commonwealth’s highest office in May 1863. Gettysburg was the last campaign in which they served together. The younger Smith would flee America after the war and settle in South Africa, where he died in 1928.

JOHN G. PIERCE

CHARLES A. BUTTS

CAPTAIN + 10TH NEW YORK CAVALRY On July 2, Pierce and 50 of his comrades in the 10th New York Cavalry volunteered to reconnoiter a wooded area near Brinkerhoff’s Ridge to determine the position and strength of Confederates known to be there.

They found the Rebels just as they were about to advance and helped drive them back.

Pierce would die in 1868 from tuberculosis, which he contracted shortly after the Gettysburg Campaign.

1ST LIEUT. + 121ST NEW YORK INFANTRY Butts and his comrades manned defensive positions on Little Round Top from the evening of July 2 through the rest of the battle.

The following year, Butts lost his life during the fighting for the “Mule Shoe” salient at Spotsylvania.

THOMAS DWIGHT WITHERSPOON CHAPLAIN + 42ND MISSISSIPPI INFANTRY

Witherspoon was captured on July 5 as he celebrated Mass with wounded soldiers who remained on the battlefield. He endured several months in confinement before being exchanged. Witherspoon survived the war and lived until 1898.

Cyrus Bachelder SERGEANT +

KIRKBRIDE TAYLOR 1ST SGT. +

17TH CONNECTICUT INFANTRY

8TH VIRGINIA INFANTRY

At Barlow’s Knoll on July 1, Bachelder was knocked unconscious and fell into enemy hands when a fence rail, sent flying by an artillery shell, slammed into his chest. He was held in the Lutheran Theological Seminary with other Union prisoners for two days, then granted a battlefield parole when the engagement turned in favor of Federal forces.

Taylor was shot in the head during Pickett’s Charge and forced to fall back. He survived the wound, which left an indentation that remained until his death in 1913.

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thomas clark CAPTAIN +

U.S. SIGNAL CORPS

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

On July 1, Clark observed approaching Confederates from the steeple of the two-story Adams County Courthouse in downtown Gettysburg. He sent off a quick message about the enemy advance to XI Corps commander Oliver Howard before leaving for safer ground. Clark would remain in the Signal Corps for the remainder of the war; he died in 1868.

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JAMES H. KRAKE CORPORAL + 44TH NEW YORK INFANTRY

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Krake and the 44th participated in the fight for Little Round Top. He escaped without injury only to be killed in action the following year at the Battle of the Wilderness.

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GEORGE DAVID RAYSOR 2ND LIEUT. + 5TH FLORIDA INFANTRY

12TH NEW JERSEY INFANTRY

HENRY NEWTON COMEY SERGEANT + 2ND MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY Comey and his comrades participated in a suicidal charge against a well-protected Confederate position near Spangler’s Spring on July 3. More than one-third of the regiment’s men were casualties, including Comey, who suffered a serious gunshot wound to the left arm. Comey would recover and return to the regiment, mustering out with his comrades as a captain in 1865. He died in 1932.

Chew fought with his men to keep the Bliss barn out of enemy hands during a seesaw struggle throughout the second day’s fighting.

The following day, Chew and his comrades helped repulse Pickett’s Charge. Chew, who ended the war as lieutenant colonel of the 12th, died in 1907.

CHAUNCEY BARNES REESE

GETTYSBURG

CAPTAIN +

FA C E S o f

Henry Chew

Raysor and his 5th Florida Infantry saw heavy fighting at Gettysburg.

On July 2, the regiment battled Union forces along the Emmitsburg road, during which Raysor’s captain was wounded.

Raysor led his company the following day during Pickett’s Charge. In two days, the brigade in which the 5th served suffered 455 casualties, out of 700 men engaged. Raysor was not among them; he survived the war and lived until 1909.

CAPTAIN + U.S. CORPS OF ENGINEERS

On July 2, Reese and two other officers accompanied Major General Gouverneur K. Warren to Little Round Top, where they discovered a large mass of Confederates advancing on the exposed hill. The four men scrambled successfully to find Union troops to hold the position.

Reese ended the war as a brevet brigadier general.

He went on to join the regular army, and died on duty in 1870 from yellow fever.

Loring Muzzey & William Henry Scott 1ST LIEUT., CONTRABAND SLAVE + 12TH MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY

Thirteen-year-old contraband slave William Henry Scott witnessed the battle with the Union officer he served, Loring Muzzey of the 12th Massachusetts Infantry, which suffered heavy casualties during the first day’s fighting near Oak Hill. Both survived the war, and remained friends afterward. Muzzey passed away in 1909, and Scott died seven months later.

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HIRAM H. DAVIS PRIVATE + 10TH VERMONT INFANTRY

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

FA C E S o f

GETTYSBURG

After the battle, Davis and his comrades escorted more than 1,000 captured Rebels to a prisoner-of-war camp in Baltimore.

He suffered sunstroke along the way and spent most of the rest of the war in and out of hospitals.

He would recover fully from his ailments and live until 1930.

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William Gaston Delony LIEUTENANT COLONEL + COBB’S LEGION CAVALRY

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

A few miles north of Gettysburg, near Hunterstown, Delony led Confederate cavalry in a July 2 charge that blunted a Union attack commanded by newly minted brigadier general George Armstrong Custer. Delony had his horse shot from under him and narrowly escaped capture by three Federal troopers, whom he fought off with the help of two comrades.

He was not as lucky a few months later, when he was shot in the thigh and fell into enemy hands. He died the following month in a Washington, D.C., hospital.

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WILLIAM PROBY YOUNG JR. SURGEON + 4TH GEORGIA INFANTRY

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Dr. Young tended to the desperately wounded men from his regiment and their brigade throughout the battle.

He survived the war and settled in Washington, D.C., where he lived until his death in 1912.

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Michael Clancy OSCAR VINCENT SMITH PRIVATE +

1ST LIEUT. + 5TH NEW JERSEY INFANTRY

JOHN ELLS 2ND LIEUT. +

Bryan Whitfield Cobb

Smith participated in the furious artillery bombardment that preceded Pickett’s Charge.

He received his corporal’s stripes after the battle and would fight with the Army of Northern Virginia until war's end. Smith lived until 1894.

GETTYSBURG

On July 2, Ells and his comrades charged Union forces posted along the Emmitsburg road and captured cannon manned by two Union batteries, only to lose them during a counterattack. Ells would be shot in the right hip two weeks later, ending his combat service. He left the army in 1864 and lived until 1889.

1ST VIRGINIA ARTILLERY

CAPTAIN + 2ND NORTH CAROLINA INFANTRY

A musket ball ripped into Cobb’s thigh while he and the 2nd North Carolina drove Union forces out of Gettysburg during the first day’s fighting. Cobb, who would return to duty several months later, suffered six more battlefield injuries before war’s end. He survived them all, and died in 1906.

joseph h. baxter CAPTAIN + 22ND MASSACHUSETTS INFANTRY

Baxter and the rest of the Union V Corps arrived in Gettysburg about dawn on July 2 after an all-night march.

Later that day the regiment was in the thick of the action near Devil’s Den, where it suffered high casualties.

Baxter was not among them. He would receive a mortal wound less than a year later during fighting at Bethesda Church, Virginia.

FA C E S o f

3RD GEORGIA INFANTRY

Clancy commanded a company of the 5th New Jersey during the intense fighting along the Emmitsburg road between the Rogers and Klingel farmhouses on July 2.

Caught in a hail of enemy infantry and artillery fire, the Jerseymen were eventually overwhelmed and withdrew. Clancy survived the war, living until 1899.

SULLIVAN W. BURBANK CAPTAIN + 14TH U.S. INFANTRY Burbank and the 14th were engaged heavily during the battle’s second day, battling Confederate infantry near Little Round Top. Burbank managed to avoid injury. In 1864, he was shot and taken prisoner at the Wilderness.

He died in captivity.

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SAMUEL BEAN NOYES

DAVID BARNUM PRIVATE +

CORPORAL +

5TH ALABAMA INFANTRY

FA C E S o f

GETTYSBURG

12TH NEW HAMPSHIRE INFANTRY When Confederate forces launched a savage attack on July 2 to exploit the gap created after General Daniel Sickles advanced his III Corps a half-mile ahead of its assigned position, the 12th New Hampshire found itself in the middle of the fray. Among those wounded was Noyes, who suffered a severe shoulder injury. He would recover and become an officer in the 1st U.S. Volunteer Infantry, a regiment recruited from the ranks of Confederate prisoners of war (so-called “Galvanized Yankees”) that was sent to guard against Indian uprisings out West. Noyes died in 1870.

PHOTOGRAPHS: Bryan Whitfield Cobb, John Ells, William Gaston Delony, and Thomas Dwight Witherspoon courtesy David Wynn Vaughan; William Proby Young Jr. and Frederick Waugh Smith courtesy William A. Turner; William Henry Scott courtesy Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University; David Barnum and George David Raysor courtesy U.S. Army Military History Institute; William Worthington Goldsborough, Oscar Vincent Smith and Kirkbride Taylor courtesy the Museum of the Confederacy. All other images courtesy Ronald S. Coddington

Barnum stuffed his haversack with candy, lemons, and other goodies confiscated from townspeople in Gettysburg and distributed them to his comrades in the 5th Alabama Infantry, which had fought its way through the town early in the action.

Barnum survived the battle and died shortly after the war.

WILLIAM WORTHINGTON GOLDSBOROUGH

James Bryant CAPTAIN + 5TH NEW YORK CAVALRY

Bryant and his comrades were among the Union horsemen who clashed with General J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry at Hunterstown. Bryant, who survived the battle without injury, would be wounded and captured near Spotsylvania in May 1864.

MAJOR + 2ND MARYLAND INFANTRY

Goldsborough took command of the 2nd Maryland on July 2 after its colonel was wounded at Culp’s Hill. During renewed fighting to take the position the next day, a bullet tore through Goldsborough’s left lung and exited his back.

He was captured by Union forces on the battlefield and would spend the next nine months recovering in hospitals in Gettysburg and Baltimore. He spent the remainder of the war in Union prisons and lived until 1901.

Edward Burgin Knox MAJOR + 44TH NEW YORK INFANTRY

Knox (left) received a brevet promotion for gallant conduct for his role in the successful defense of Little Round Top on July 2.

Knox survived the battle and the war.

He continued a military career after the conflict and died in 1890.

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William H. Rogers 2ND LIEUT. + 6TH MAINE LIGHT ARTILLERY

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Rogers fought with dogged determination along the Wheatfield with his battery of the 6th Maine Light Artillery on July 2. He later led a detachment under fire from enemy sharpshooters to recover four abandoned Union cannon on the field. After the battle, he was promoted to captain and command of his battery.

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THE LONG ROLL OF FIRE

From the war’s outset, the men of the 20TH MASSACHUSETTS VOLUNTEER INFANTRY had never shied from a fight, shedding blood on the conflict’s grimmest battlefields. At Gettysburg, as Pickett’s Charge roared toward their lines, the Bay Staters would again be called into the breach.

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

BY PATRICK BRENNAN

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PHOTOGRAPH CREDIT HERE

Union and Confederate forces clash during Pickett’s Charge in this engraving of Peter Frederick Rothermel’s 1870 painting “The Battle of Gettysburg.”

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N FALMOUTH, VIRGINIA, on the night of June 3, 1863, the Massachusetts men could peer across the Rappahannock River and see the glow. West of the battered town of Fredericksburg, flames rose along six miles of Confederate fortifications that they knew well. As daylight groaned across the sky, an unearthly silence settled on the area, even as the stunning truth dawned. The enemy’s charred fortifications stood empty, the Rebels of the Army of Northern Virginia gone. Rumors swirled while the men packed their knapsacks and awaited their fate.

One month later they rose again, this time along a badly congested roadway. The intervening march had been hellish: two weeks and 190 miles of rough tracks and river crossings, mountains and meadows. Rains had given way to sun and mud to dust, yet on they had trudged, snaking across the battle-scarred landscape of Virginia and Maryland, searching for the Rebels.

As they crossed the Pennsylvania state line on July 1, artillery concussions echoed from the north and smoke rose above the distant hills.

The soldiers understood they now advanced toward the sound of guns, a prospect most of them welcomed. After all, they bore the insignia of the 20th regiment from the state of Massachusetts— one that had appeared on every major battlefield in the war’s eastern theater.

Battle was in their blood.

BAPTISM The officers, born and raised in Boston’s finest homes, left their white-collared pursuits or the halls of Harvard College in 1861 to recruit a gaggle of volunteers and whip them into military shape. Some of the Harvard men had experiLieutenant Oliver enced disciplinary problems while in school; only Wendell Holmes Jr. a few were truly good students. Many regarded volunteering as a method to bring value to their upper-crust lives.

Mostly Democrats and unionists, they carried storied names like Revere, Abbott, Lee, and Holmes to Camp Massasoit near Readville. There, they faced down a crowd that included Nantucket seamen and Boston toughs, factory workers and farmers, laborers and craftsmen, even a photographer and a piano maker. Half of these

volunteers were immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Germany, and few shared their officers’ genteel ways.¹ On July 18, 1861, this motley assortment of 39 officers and 787 enlistees received the designation of 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. The regiment’s well-connected commander, 53-year-old Colonel William Raymond Lee, thought his new charges entirely deficient, but he and his officers continued to work with a stubborn and patriotic zeal. The volunteers responded in kind. Within weeks the unit displayed an impressive and wellearned martial acumen. When they broke camp in early September, the citizen-soldiers of the 20th were itching for a fight.² Their baptism commenced on October 16. The regiment crossed the Potomac River at Ball’s Bluff to support an ill-designed thrust at Leesburg, Virginia. Counter-attacked and surrounded on some wooded heights along the river, 88 Bay Staters lay dead or wounded at the battle’s end, while Lee and Major Paul Revere—the 29-year-old grandson of the Revolutionary War hero—joined 21 other officers and 88 privates in captivity. Wounded badly in the neck but evacuated safely across the river, Lieutenant Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. contemplated ending his life with a swig of laudanum until a doctor convinced him otherwise. The 20-year-old would recover quickly and rejoin the unit. The hard-nosed Lieutenant Henry Abbott—a diminutive 19-year-old—also survived the maelstrom. At first fearful of failure under fire, Abbott surprised himself and his compatriots with his ferocity and bravery.

The two young officers, comrades first at Harvard and now at arms, would set a high standard indeed.³

MEN OF WAR After spending the winter patrolling the Potomac, the 20th received orders to join Napoleon Dana’s brigade of John Sedgwick’s division in General Edwin Sumner’s II Corps. So began their march into the cruel grind of war as a cog in General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.

On May 2, 1862—two weeks into McClellan’s ill-fated Peninsula Campaign—recently released prisoners of war William Lee and Paul Revere rejoined the regiment. Four weeks of hard campaigning later, the Bay Staters rushed to blunt an enemy attack near Fair Oaks, Virginia.

In the ensuing battle, the victorious 20th gloried

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COURTESY OF THE U.S. ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER (2)

Among the 20th Massachusetts field and staff officers in this 1861 image are Major Paul Revere (far left)—the 29-year-old grandson of the Revolutionary War hero—and the regiment’s well-connected commander, 53-year-old Colonel William Raymond Lee (seated center). Both men were taken prisoner during the regiment’s first engagement at Ball’s Bluff in October 1861.

at the sight of retreating Rebels, and new recruit Lieutenant Henry Ropes—a bookish, 23-year-old Christian from Harvard—impressed all with his bravery under fire. Then, at the end of June during the Seven Days Battles, Henry Abbott took a bullet to the arm as the regiment again countered an enemy thrust near Glendale. During it all, brutal weather, short supplies, and debilitating disease waylaid the suffering soldiers. By the time the failed campaign ended and the regiment shuffled into camp at Harrison’s Landing on the James River, the regiment had been ground down to bare existence. Lee and Revere, already weakened by the brutality of their POW experience, lay prostrated by malaria. Abbott would soon depart to recover from both his wounds and the news of his beloved brother’s death in battle.⁴ So began a year of bloody frustration.

In August, Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his reinvigorated Army of Northern Virginia swept north, routing a polyglot Federal force led

by General John Pope, then raiding across the Potomac into Maryland. McClellan pursued and engaged Lee near the town of Sharpsburg. There, fighting raged on September 17 from dawn until mid-morning, when Sumner launched his entire

corps across the charnel house of a disputed cornfield, unaware that the westward axis of his attack put half the Rebel army on his left flank. The ensuing engagement and Federal rout swept Sumner— and the 20th—from the field. By day’s end, 137 more of Massachusetts’ finest—including Oliver Wendell Holmes—had joined the casualty list.⁵ Within a few days, Colonel Lee suffered a breakdown and left the regiment, never to return.⁶ Three months later, with Ambrose Burnside now commanding the army, the 20th participated in the vicious street fighting in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Now recovered from his Peninsula injuries, Henry Abbott’s courageous leadership under fire drew praise from his comrades, cementing his reputation as a wildcat in a fight. The regiment also joined the doomed December 13 assault on Marye’s Heights, a mismanaged attempt to break the impregnable Confederate defense along the Sunken Road. A day later, they would return to their camps in Falmouth across the Rappahannock River, defeated, disheartened, and angry.⁷ As the army lay in winter quarters, strong emotions rippled through the regiment, especially in the heart and mind of Henry Abbott. The young officer knew that Burnside had little acumen to lead an army: Besides the devastating defeat, disease was rampant, rations were terrible, and spirits were low. Although Abbott welcomed the possibility of McClellan’s return, he had lost confidence that the Confederacy could be defeated in battle. As a Democrat and a unionist, he also felt disgusted by Lincoln’s recent Emancipa-

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tion Proclamation. For Abbott, as for many Union soldiers, emancipation of slaves had no business as a war aim. Only Burnside’s resignation and replacement by General Joseph Hooker in late January 1863 assuaged a portion of the young man’s bitter season of disillusionment. A vastly improved quartermaster corps and Hooker’s new, top-down efficiency raised the morale of soldiers, including Abbott, but most still felt the intemperate Hooker would fail, like McClellan and Burnside before him.⁸ One piece of army affairs rankled Abbott and his fellow officers like no other. The colonelcy of the regiment had become something of a political plum, and Massachusetts governor John Andrew decided to place Paul Revere in command, superseding the unit’s highly regarded acting leader, Major George Macy. Revere had left the regiment after the Seven Days Battles for a corps staff position and then suffered a wound at Antietam. When he recovered, he campaigned actively for the commission, a breach of decorum that Henry Abbott found both dishonorable and unforgivable.⁹ In late April, the war resumed. “Fighting Joe” Hooker flanked Lee’s forces along the Fredericksburg line, but the Confederate chieftain bluffed the northerner into a defensive cocoon in the tangled wilderness near Chancellorsville.

For two days Lee pummeled his opponent, who ordered the 20th Massachusetts to join an assault across the December battlefield

in an effort to relieve the pressure. Colonel Norman Hall—already a national hero for his service at Fort Sumter—now commanded the brigade and ably drove home his part of the attack. The 20th helped push the Rebels out of the infamous Sunken Road and across Marye’s Heights, but Hooker suffered a complete collapse of confidence and called for a general retreat back to Falmouth. The casualties in the 20th were few (although Oliver Wendell Holmes was struck in the heel), but that didn’t stop the growing rumblings among the men.

Henry Ropes wrote to his brother about the “vast groan” emanating from the entire army over Hooker’s incompetence and the desire to see McClellan returned to command.

It was clear that the Army of the Potomac had suffered yet another Lieutenant Henry Abbott terrible defeat.¹⁰ In the wake of the debacle, fissures in the regiment erupted. Paul Revere openly espoused abolitionism, which drew some likeminded officers but enraged others. Captain John Putnam, who had lost an arm at Ball’s Bluff, not

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The Army of Northern Virginia crosses the Potomac River in mid-June 1863 during General Robert E. Lee’s second invasion of the North.

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only supported Revere but also spoke critically of Macy and Abbott. Revere did himself few favors when he displayed a creaky grasp of basic drills, drawing snickers and worse behind his back. For his part, Abbott simply hoped for the day when he, Macy, and Holmes might take over the regiment from the dishonored Revere and “the cripples.”¹¹ Meanwhile, the enlisted men drafted a letter to Governor Andrew complaining about the punishment meted out by a new arrival, Lieutenant Sumner Paine. The 18-year-old Harvard student had instituted harsh measures for any break of discipline and the soldiers had reached their limit.

Paine himself could not have cared less. Divisional commander John Gibbon had ordered a crackdown, and Paine—a brawny, physical force—gladly complied.¹² For a month, these tensions ran rampant.

Then, the fires of June 3 lit the night sky.

In the morning, the Army of Northern Virginia had disappeared, its destination unknown.

Eleven days later, with news that the Rebels were headed north, the 20th Massachusetts broke camp and began its pursuit.

THE CHASE By the time the 20th reached Thoroughfare Gap west of Manassas, hard information about the new campaign proved impossible to obtain. Camp talk included the possibility that Lee had reversed himself and was now marching west to join the Army of Tennessee. The men felt isolated and alone, and they grumbled about II Corps commander Winfield Scott Hancock and his long, hard slogs. On June 28, after the 20th crossed the Potomac River and swung into Monocacy Junction, Maryland, the men learned that V Corps commander George Gordon Meade had replaced Hooker as the head of the Army of the Potomac.

Meade’s fine reputation was already well established, and the Bay Staters exulted in the change.

Henry Ropes represented perhaps the entire regiment when he wrote to his brother of “better things to come”—but those better things were still two hard marches away.¹³ On June 29, the rancor of the past seemed to melt away in the rain as the men covered an astounding 30 miles. The officers proudly noted that stragglers were few and ranks were closed, although everyone—including Colonel Revere— joined in some foraging at the march’s end. The colonel had struggled mightily with his lingering malaria and Antietam injury but kept to his course during the march, an effort that deeply impressed Henry Abbott and Revere’s other rivals. As the regiment made Taneytown near midday on July 1, news that I Corps commander John Reynolds had

been killed at the burgeoning conflict up ahead infused the 20th with even more determination. By day’s end, just three miles from the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, the Bay Staters settled into camp, old scores forgotten, new battles to fight.¹⁴ Night passed, and as the horizon brightened on July 2, Paul Revere scratched a letter to his wife. He warned her that a decisive fight seemed imminent, and he prayed, “For myself I feel that God will order what is best for all of us.” He signed it, then called his men to action.¹⁵

POSITIONS The 20th Massachusetts—numbering around 300 men—marched second in the brigade column, which took to the adjoining fields to avoid the tangle along the Taneytown Pike. Around 6 a.m., they emerged at the base of a ridge running west of and parallel to the pike. To the north, Union troops crowded the crests of two hills. The brigade stood in line for an hour, and Abbott assumed they would soon move to support those lines. Suddenly, a flurry of riders distributing orders to the brigadiers quashed that thought. Under a barely overcast sky, the entire II Corps smartly turned left and deployed into battle line facing west on the ridge’s crest, the right flank connecting with the Federals on the westernmost of the two northern hills.¹⁶ Besides being on a modest but telling crest, the position enjoyed the protection of a sturdy stone wall typical of the area. There was one possible problem: John Gibbon’s division drew the assignment to man a section of the wall that zigzagged west then south to front a copse of trees.

Gibbon placed General Alexander S. Webb’s brigade along the angle, then located three regiments of Colonel Norman J. Hall’s brigade on a line south. The wall here became a rail fence that the men threw down for protection. Perhaps reluctantly, the 20th Massachusetts formed the reserve, lying down in line about 30 yards east of the brigade and due south of the trees. Two regiments from Brigadier General William Harrow’s brigade repositioned themselves 300 yards to the front.¹⁷ Henry Abbott and Henry Ropes walked forward past the dismantled fence to get a look at their surroundings. This was good ground with open fields of fire. About 100 yards to the west on a slight rise, a Federal battery deployed. Less than a mile farther on, the Harvard men saw another ridge, tree-covered and slightly forbidding. Running in the valley between theirs and the opposing ridge was a roadway where the two regiments from Harrow’s brigade had already set up shop. Revere dispatched 30 skirmishers from the 20th in support; Abbott and Ropes watched as they angled toward a cluster of farm buildings on the roadway to the left front. Beyond the farm Abbott detected Federal supply wagons moving up the road rather leisurely. To the south, both men could see their ridge flattening into open fields and woodlots with twin hills rising about 2,500

Abbott simply hoped for the day when he, Macy, and Holmes might take over the regiment from the dishonored Revere and “the cripples.”

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ONE AMONG MANY As the sun began to set on the turgid, smokefilled horizon, a long Rebel battle line slid out of the darkness and crushed Harrow’s two regiments and the 20th’s skirmishers out near the farm buildings. That collapse in turn uncovered the Union battery in the field 100 yards to the west of Hall’s line and prompted its hasty retreat. Two of its guns raced through the 20th’s line and went into action directly to their rear. So near were their muzzles that the first shots burned a number of the men. The Confederate attackers followed in their wake, but the rifle fire from Hall’s remaining two frontline regiments, plus the Federals covering the copse of trees, blasted them back. But at the same time, perhaps 100 yards to the south, the Rebels plowed into the chasm left by Caldwell’s departure and muscled onto the crest of the ridge.

The Rebels had pierced the Union center.²¹ Standing on the brink of the abyss, Henry Abbott turned toward a sublime scene. There rode the II Corps commander, Winfield Scott Hancock, with his hat in his hand. At the double-quick behind him raced two divisions of the I Corps. As Abbott and his mates cheered themselves hoarse, Hancock’s relief force surged past their position and slammed into the Confederate interlopers. The Rebels reeled and the crisis dissipated. In what seemed like a miraculously short time, the general’s timely arrival had turned disaster into victory.²² WITH NIGHT FULLY FALLEN, Norman Hall ordered the 20th Massachusetts to deploy as the leftmost of his three frontline regiments. While the men built a trench a foot deep and a foot high with the one shovel they could find, Henry Abbott took stock. About 10 of the Bay Staters in the main line had been killed or wounded, all by Confederate cannon fire.

He counted another 10 of the skirmishers, including three officers, as additional casualties.

Lieutenant With Revere’s severe injury, Henry Ropes Lieutenant Colonel Macy rose to regimental command. Abbott would be his second.²³ As Abbott calculated their losses, the hideous cries of the wounded and the dying filled the air. Henry Ropes’ Christian devotion drove him to action.

He organized a relief party to convey the wounded from across the entire front to the rear, offering what comfort he could to Reb and Yank alike.

Occasional picket fire did little to disrupt his errand of mercy.

Sometime before dawn on July 3, Ropes returned to the trench.²⁴ Four regiments now stretched north from the 20th’s right flank past the now familiar copse. An artillery section shared part of the line near the trees, and another battery deployed south of it. East of the 20th, the offending artillery from the previous day remained in place, now about 50 yards away. Behind those guns stood two more infantry regiments in support. To the south, off the 20th’s left flank, the Federal line ran as far as the eye could see, up and

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yards away. Abbott considered the position somewhat dangerous.¹⁸ Except for intermittent rifle fire and the stray artillery report, the morning quietly drifted into the afternoon. Occasionally single aides and full staffs thundered up and down the Taneytown Pike.

The II Corps’ leftmost division under John Caldwell expected General Daniel Sickles’ III Corps to come up and extend the line to the south. Instead, sometime past noon, soldiers reported elements of the III Corps engaged in some incomprehensible movements well to the south and west. Around 2 p.m., Abbott saw what seemed to be the entire left of the army moving to the west and adopting a new position. He thought it magnificent.¹⁹ Colonel Paul Revere Then, around 4 p.m., the unmistakable cacophony of battle began.

The army’s left was getting hit, and hard.

The noise began to roll and tumble as the battlefront grimly expanded. Dense smoke billowed, cutting off the Bay Staters’ view of the action.

An hour passed, then another, and the roiling bedlam came closer, desperately so. Under orders, Caldwell’s entire division rose up and rushed into the maelstrom. Hall and Harrow were told to send two regiments apiece to join the fight. When the smoke occasionally dissipated, Abbott could see pockets of Dan Sickles’ survivors making short-lived stands against a tide of Confederate steel. Rebel shot and shell began to scour the ridge, wounding and killing some of the prone northerners. Paul Revere walked among the men, offering encouragement and comforting the wounded. Henry Ropes also rose to calm his people, but Abbott screamed at him to get down. Just then another enemy shell burst overhead. As Ropes hit the dirt, a fragment from the shell ripped through Paul Revere’s chest and lodged in his midsection. Startled calls for help quickly sounded, and soon a stretcher crew lifted up the stricken officer and bore him away.²⁰ A horrid realization confronted the 20th: Were they witnessing the end of the Army of the Potomac?

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THE REPULSE OF PICKETT’S CHARGE | GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA | JULY 3, 1863 Determined to break through Union lines on the battle’s third day, General Robert E. Lee ordered three Confederate divisions—approximately 12,500 men—to advance against the Army of the Potomac’s positions on Cemetery Ridge. A massive artillery bombardment preceded the infantry attack, which launched at approximately 2 p.m. and proceeded over nearly a mile of open, undulating ground. Though decimated by Union rifle and artillery fire, the Confederate lines marched on. When the men of General George Pickett’s division—consisting of the troops of generals James Kemper, Lewis Armistead, and Richard Garnett—succeeded in piercing the Union line near a copse of trees, Union troops from other parts of the line, including the 20th Massachusetts, rushed into the breach and beat back the assault. With the charge’s failure, Lee decided to end the fight, withdrawing his army back toward the safety of Virginia.

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THE LONG ROLL OF FIRE Near dawn, the noise of battle to the north The morning clouds soon lessened, and the July sun drove up the swelled, then died. As the day brightened, desultory temperature well into the 80s. All across the Federal lines the solpicket fire continued. Every now and then a stray diers sought shade by building shelters out of their tents, supported artillery shell struck nearby. At 9 a.m., a Federal by whatever they could substitute for poles. Some jousting occurred gunner decided to answer. As was his wont, Henry at a farm west of the roadway and somewhat north of the 20th’s Ropes was reading a Charles Dickens novel when position. A barn burned and the opposing forces drew off. Then, as the artillerist’s reply exploded prematurely, noon approached, silence. almost directly over the 20th. A piece Hancock, inspecting his lines, thought it ominous.²⁶ of shrapnel fractured a private’s arm.

Abbott, peering out at the fields, found the time terAnother drilled into Ropes’ back and rible. exploded through his chest. Macy Some noticed Confederate artillery emerging and Abbott rushed to the scene, but from that forbidding, tree-shrouded ridge a mile to Ropes died almost instantly. An amthe west. Still, the silence dragged on. Then, near bulance soon drew up and carried 1 p.m., a single Rebel gun fired off a round well to the lieutenant’s body away.²⁵ the south. Within moments, the enemy’s entire line Ropes’ death was a single loss exploded. The 20th Massachusetts got on their bellies during a prolonged lull, an accident of and pressed up against their embankment.²⁷ fate, a cruel case of friendly fire. PerFor the next two hours, the northerners endured a The silver II Corps badge haps that is why so many of his combrutal, all-out bombardment, but the Sturm und Drang worn by 20th Massachusetts soldier Benjamin Hanaford, rades thought the blow so heavy and far outweighed the results. Within a few minutes, Macy who was wounded during cried so unabashedly. and Abbott realized the avalanche of shot and shell was the fighting on July 3.

Tears dried. Time, and the battle, landing well behind the hunkering infantry front and moved on. doing much more damage to the artillery and the re-

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They reloaded and sent a second volley into the gloom, then a third. Only a few shots rattled out in response, and Abbott saw four or five of his men fall. Then, as the haze cleared, they all beheld the bloody results of their work. The Rebel flags and their bearers were down. Clumps of two or three survivors ran about, panicked and disoriented, appearing to Abbott like headless chickens.

The rest of the once-fearsome line either moved farther north or lay bleeding across the front, wounded, dying, or dead.³² The Bay Staters cheered wildly, with chants of “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” ringing over the battle noise. Behind the lines, where Colonel Hall calmly took in this scene of victory and destruction, a member of John Gibbon’s staff—Lieutenant Frank Haskell—galloped up.

Webb’s brigade defending the wall around the copse was in trouble. Could Hall assist him? Hall said he could. Haskell begged for speed. Hall said he would move at once. Haskell replied, “Good,” and watched as Hall called out for his men to prepare to move.³³ Even as Hall and Haskell conferred, Lieutenant Colonel Macy tried to make out what was happening to the north. To his shock, he discovered that Rebels had broken the Federal front line and poured over the breach and into the copse of trees.

Macy alerted Abbott to the danger and told him to realign the 20th to face it. Abbott ran over to Company I on the regiment’s right flank. Over the fearful noise, he tried to order them to fall back to form the right flank for the new line facing north.

As the single company pulled off the front line, the rest of the regiment took their movement as orders for a general fallback. They too began to retire.

For a moment, Abbott panicked. He wondered, at this crisis of battle, would the 20th fail to pitch in to stem the gray tide? Might this be Antietam again, where the 20th was swept from the field? No. In the maelstrom, somehow Abbott drew Company I’s attention and commanded them to attack. With little regard to formation, some 30 men from Massachusetts drew up their rifles and raced with Henry Abbott toward the battle raging 100 yards away.³⁴

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serves well to the east. Be it a quirk of geography, poor aim, or just plain luck, the front line escaped the brunt of the storm.²⁸ Smoke soon descended and cast an eerie pall. The world became a haze of detonation and concussion, a hallucinogenic series of barely connected events. Horses ridden and riderless streaked left and right. A caisson exploded to the north, near the copse. Some nearby guns took hits and had to be replaced. General Hancock rode across the front and offered firm words of encouragement, but many of the men realized they were in an unlikely position of safety, and some, lured by the incessant noise, fell asleep. Norman Hall thought it terrifying and grand, but Henry Abbott blessed the trench the men had dug and counted only Lieutenant Colonel four or five casualties among his charges.²⁹ George Macy After two hours, the firing died off. The infantry stayed flat on the ground, but all stared to the west where the unmistakable movements of an army on the attack began to develop. From the 20th’s position, it looked like two equal forces had started to march.

One seemingly rose up from the ground southwest of the farm where the pickets had fought the day before; Abbott thought this force the greater danger and quickly calculated two brigades in two lines. The other enemy formation rolled out of the trees on the ridgeline a mile directly to the west. Hall ordered his regiments to lay low and wait, but the view of the well-ordered Confederates so stirred some of the men that they cheered their enemy’s courage. That wouldn’t last. Even from this distance they could tell the assault was coming directly at them. Word passed up and down the line: This time the Federals would be defending the high ground. This would be the Union’s version of Fredericksburg.³⁰ The temperature hit 87 degrees. Cumulus clouds drifted across the blue summer sky.

Not 400 yards to the south of the 20th, a mass of guns began to plant shot and shell in the Rebel ranks. More cannon opened from the hills anchoring the army’s flanks. Behind the Bay Staters and north near the copse, Union artillerists slammed their charges home and launched their metal at the flag-studded enemy lines. The aim was accurate, the results were obvious, but on the Rebels came.

The attackers to the southwest swept over the embattled farm and the fences lining the intervening roadway. Federal artillery shredded their right flank, causing some to slow down and face the fire, and others to bunch north and escape it. In the confusion, the Rebel formation angled northeast toward the copse, presenting what was left of its right flank to the Yankee riflemen. Still on they came.

Through the choking artillery smoke, Norman Hall, his sword in hand, began a deadly calculation. He waited until the enemy got within 200 yards of his front before barking out the order for his brigade to rise and fire. Macy, Abbott, and the regiment’s surviving officers called up their men. The 20th’s soldiers clambered to their feet, raised their muskets, took brief aim, and delivered a shivering volley.³¹ A wall of smoke poured from their guns and blanketed their front. Still, they could see uncounted Rebels crashing to the ground.

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THE COPSE OF TREES Just as Macy called out for the rest of the regiment to follow Abbott, a spent shot knocked him to the ground and sent his sword flying. As more of his boys tore off for the new front, the officer struggled to his feet. Almost immediately after he righted himself, a bullet shredded his left hand, finally forcing him from the fight. Whether he knew it or not, Henry Abbott now commanded the 20th.³⁵ Abbott sprinted along the ground just east of the Federal lines. Behind him stretched the rest of the 20th, either obeying Macy’s orders or mimicking Abbott’s heroic example. They passed Hall’s remaining two regiments, which were still exchanging blows with the Rebels in the fields to the west. Fifty yards to go, and the copse ahead

seemed alive with battle, the noise deafening. Hancock and Gibbon had personally dispatched four regiments into the tangle to join Webb’s survivors in an effort to seal the breach. Already, the fighting was close quartered and brutal, a vicious, roaring slugging match, and the men were heading straight into its grip.

Abbott closed the final yards to the southwestern limit of the trees and began to feed his men into the melee. They pushed forward and found the enemy not 15 feet away. This was like nothing the men had ever seen. Rifles blazed away at point-blank range.

A knot of screaming Rebels would press forward, only to be met by bullets, rifle butts, fists, and rocks. Any Federal thrust was greeted with the same. Abbott continued to direct more men into the cauldron, some from his 20th Massachusetts, others from the various Union regiments rushing to join the fight. The northerners stacked up six deep. A man would go down; another would press forward to take his place in a grinding destruction } CONT. ON P. 101

ENDNOTES 1

Richard F. Miller, Harvard’s Civil War: The History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Hanover and London, 2005), 29, 34-35.

2

Ibid., 35.

17 Harry Pfanz, Gettysburg: The Second Day (Chapel Hill, 1987), 376-377.

3

Ibid, 51-83, for the 20th’s action at Ball’s Bluff; Mark de Wolfe Howe, ed., Touched With Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Cambridge, 1946), 23-27, for Holmes’ wounding and subsequent thoughts of suicide; Robert Garth Scott, ed., Fallen Leaves: The Civil War Letters of Major Henry Livermore Abbott (Kent, OH, 1991), 7374, for Abbott’s self-discoveries under fire.

18 Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 257; Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863.

See Stephen W. Sears, To The Gates of Richmond (New York, 1992) for an overview of the Peninsula Campaign; Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 127131, 135, 147-151.

22 Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 269; Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863.

See Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red (New York, 1983) for an overview of the Antietam Campaign; Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 139, 170-176; Richard Miller and Robert Mooney, The Civil War: The Nantucket Experience (Nantucket, 1994), 76-77; Howe, Touched With Fire, 64-66.

24 Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 262.

4

5

n0/mode/2up (accessed March 29, 2013; hereafter cited as “Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863”).

19 Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 257.

20 Ibid., 258, 260.

21 Pfanz, Gettysburg: The Second Day, 381-389.

23 Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863.

25 Ibid., 264.

26 United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, Vol. 27, 372 (hereafter cited as OR).

6

Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 182-183.

7

See Frank O’Reilly, The Fredericksburg Campaign (Baton Rouge, 2003) for an overview of the campaign and battle; Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 199-206, 208-213; Miller and Mooney, The Nantucket Experience, 8790.

27 Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863.

8

Scott, Fallen Leaves, 149, 152, 163-165.

30 Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863.

9

Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 218-220, 244; Scott, Fallen Leaves, 178-179.

31 OR, Series I, Vol. 27, 439.

28 Ibid.

29 OR, Series I, Vol. 27, 437; Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863.

10 See Stephen Sears, Chancellorsville (New York, 1996), for an overview of the campaign and the battle; Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 233-237; Howe, Touched With Fire, 92-94. Holmes would not return to the regiment after his wounding.

32 Ibid., 445; Scott, Fallen Leaves, 188.

11 Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 244-246; Scott, Fallen Leaves, 178-183.

34 Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863.

12 Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 247-249.

35 Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 271.

13 Ibid., 250-252.

36 Edwin R. Root and Jeffrey D. Stocker, “Isn’t This Glorious!”: The 15th, 19th, and 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiments at Gettysburg’s Copse of Trees (Bethlehem, PA, 2006), 36.

14 Ibid., 253-254.

15 Paul Revere to Lucretia Revere, July 2, 1863, Revere Family Papers, 1746-1964, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts.

16 Miller, Harvard’s Civil War, 256; Henry Abbott to John Ropes, August 1, 1863, in Reports, Letters & Papers Appertaining to 20th Mass. Vol. Inf. Vol. 1, http://archive.org/stream/reportsletterspa01asso#page/

33 Frank A. Haskell, The Battle of Gettysburg, ed. by Bruce Catton (New York, 1958), 107-108.

37 Abbott to Ropes, August 1, 1863.

38 OR, Series I, Vol. 27, 447.

39 Holmes speech on Memorial Day, May 30, 1884, http://people.virginia. edu/~mmd5f/memorial.htm (accessed March 19, 2013).

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Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches in American history. But how to reconcile the wildly varying remembrances of those who were there to hear it? BY GLENN W. L AFANTASIE

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A crowd of dignitaries and onlookers gathers around the speakers’ platform during the dedication ceremony of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863.

President Abraham Lincoln can be seen in the highlighted circle.

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Sergeant George W. Reynolds of the 20th Maine Infantry fell wounded on the slopes of Little Round Top at Gettysburg. His regiment turned back repeated attacks by the 15th Alabama Infantry and several companies of the 47th Alabama Infantry—assaults that every Civil War scholar, student, or enthusiast knows well, for it was the counterattack of the 20th Maine that saved the Union army’s left flank at Gettysburg that day and made a hero of the regiment’s colonel, Joshua L. Chamberlain. Twentyyear-old Reynolds, however, was not as fortunate. Struck three times by enemy minie balls, Reynolds lay on the hillside for six days before comrades found him and transported him to the field hospital of the V Corps, Army of the Potomac, less than a mile east of Little Round Top. By that time, Reynolds believed he was dying.

For two weeks, he rested on straw in a barn, still suffering mightily from his wounds. Eventually he was transferred to a general army hospital in nearby York, Pennsylvania, where he began to recover.

By November 19, Reynolds was well enough to join 40 of his comrades on a train back to Gettysburg, where many of the battle’s Union dead would be reinterred in the newly established Soldiers’ National Cemetery. The country’s first national burial ground, it was situated on Cemetery Hill, the site of crucial fighting. President Abraham Lincoln saw the dedication ceremony as a chance to define the meaning of the war for the northern people. For Reynolds, now on crutches, it was a bittersweet journey. After arriving in Gettysburg, he took a few moments to visit Little Round Top, where his regiment had saved the day and he had been so severely wounded.

On Cemetery Hill, Reynolds found a spot up front, not far from the speakers’ platform where famed orator Edward Everett sat with other dignitaries, President Lincoln among them. For two hours, as Everett delivered a sweeping, epic address comparing the Battle of Gettysburg to the great battles of classical antiquity, Sergeant Reynolds remained near the platform, weary no doubt, but steady on his crutches. Then Lincoln, “gaunt and with the burden of every death written on his face,” rose and made his remarks. The president finished so quickly that Reynolds and his comrades “hardly realized that they listened to immortal words.” What they did understand, said Reynolds more than 60 years later, was that Lincoln “was the man for whom they had fought; and here he was, telling them that they had done a good job, done it well”—though they could not know he would also “inspire Americans thruout the ages.”¹ Reynolds’ reaction to our nation’s most famous speech reveals a paradox that has troubled historians since Lincoln gave his ad-

dress. The soldier claimed to hear and understand what Lincoln said, but he also confessed his belief that most people in the crowd probably did not comprehend the president’s words. Other contemporary observers are also contradictory: Some claim that Lincoln’s speech was too short to hear or digest; others maintain that few people remained to hear the president after Everett’s oration. Newspaper reports differ over what Lincoln said, how many people heard him, and whether

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (2)

On the afternoon of July 2, 1863,

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Above: Soldiers and civilians crowd the streets of Gettysburg as a military procession makes its way to Cemetery Hill, where President Lincoln would deliver the Gettysburg Address. Opposite: Lincoln as he appeared on November 8, 1863, little more than a week before he gave the famed speech.

the audience responded with applause. In 1925, William E. Barton, one of Lincoln’s biographers, identified (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) the mass of contradictions that historians inevitably encounter when they research the Gettysburg Address: “He delivered the address without notes; he held his notes in his left hand and read them in part and in part spoke without them; he held the manuscript firmly in both hands, and did not read from it, or read from it in part, or read from

it word for word as it was therein written. The address was received without enthusiasm and left the audience cold and disappointed; it was received in a reverent silence too deep for applause; it was received with feeble and perfunctory applause at the end; it was received with applause in several places and followed by prolonged applause.”² Despite the inconsistencies, some facts about the event are unchallenged, enough to give a picture of the moment beyond the few fuzzy photographs snapped on Cemetery Hill that November day.

By all accounts, the crowds were enormous. People had come from

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On the night before the dedication, the crowd turned the town into something resembling a fairground....

The noise was almost deafening. Bands played, people sang, and rowdies shouted.

rious splendor.”⁸ The procession soon flowed up Cemetery Hill to the marching tunes of four military bands. A little before noon, the proceedings began, and the crowd watched in awe and wonder as a grand ceremony unfolded, the likes of which few there had ever seen and none would forget.

As one observer noted years later, “We had heard very much more that day than we dreamed of.”⁹ The crowd was ready for something momentous, and they did not have to wait long. After a dirge from Birgfield’s Band of Philadelphia, the Reverend T. H. Stockton, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, offered a prayer, a soulful entreaty for the nation to remember that “in the freshness of their young and manly life, with such sweet memories of father and mother, brother and sister, wife and children, maiden and friends, they died for us.”

His words struck a deep chord. The New York Times reported that Stockton’s invocation, which concluded with the Lord’s Prayer, “was touching and beautiful,” and the Philadelphia Press remarked that “there was scarcely a dry eye in all that vast assemblage.” Lincoln was among those noticeably moved, and his “falling tear” was seen as proof of the “sincerity of his emotions.”¹⁰ After a reading of the lengthy regrets of im-

The event’s principal speaker, renowned orator Edward Everett, delivered a lengthy and detailed history of the Battle of Gettysburg.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

nearby townships and boroughs and as far away as Harrisburg and Baltimore to attend the dedication. Streets leading into Gettysburg were clogged, a newspaper reporter wrote, “by citizens from every quarter thronging into the village in every kind of vehicle—old Pennsylvania wagons, spring wagons, carts, family carriages, buggies, and more fashionable modern vehicles, all crowded with citizens.” The armies had long since left Gettysburg, but now the town was overwhelmed by a new “invading host” who came by wagon, by train, by horse, and by foot to witness history.³ On the night before the dedication, the crowd turned the town into something resembling a fairground. Along the streets, torches lit the way for the surging mass of people who jammed taverns, hotels, and boardinghouses. The noise was almost deafening. Bands played, people sang, and rowdies shouted—not the kind of backdrop one would associate with the solemn occasion of a cemetery dedication.⁴ Men were drinking, and some were drunk. Even John Hay and John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretaries, imbibed a few glasses of whiskey. Nicolay, said Hay in his diary, “sung his little song of the ‘Three Thieves,’ and then we sung ‘John Brown.’”⁵ Hoping to see Lincoln, the crowd serenaded him that evening at the home of David Wills, where the president was spending the night, and called for him to come out.

Lincoln stood in the doorway for a few minutes, then slipped back inside. Later a larger crowd gathered and made a terrible racket, calling for the president from beneath a window. A military band played, a male quartet serenaded, and a group of young women sang “We Are Coming Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More.” When Lincoln reappeared, the crowd asked him to speak, something he did not like doing without a prepared text, but he did make a few extemporaneous remarks. Lincoln retreated quickly, however, and the crowd moved next door and found William Seward, the secretary of state, who was more than willing to deliver a speech. Lincoln spent the rest of the night writing and briefly conferring with Seward. Around midnight, the president went to bed, but it is hard to imagine anyone getting much sleep amid the high spirits and loud revelries of the merry multitudes.⁶ With the daylight it was easier to guess the size of the crowd.

Some observers thought that there were as many as 50,000 people in town (one person guessed 150,000), although a more reasonable estimate is 15,000. When the president emerged from the Wills house to join the procession of dignitaries marching to the cemetery, the crowd greeted him with “three hearty cheers,” and clumps of people surged toward him, arms outstretched to shake his hand or touch him. At first the mass of people was orderly, but soon people began jostling Lincoln and cramming in all around him. Finally Ward Hill Lamon, marshal-in-chief of the day’s events and Lincoln’s unofficial bodyguard, ordered the crowd to move back. The people slowly retreated, but not before issuing a few more cheers for “Father Abraham” and “honest Old Abe.”⁷ It was a perfect day for the ceremony. “The sky was cloudless,” remembered a Gettysburg resident, “and the sun shone out in glo-

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

portant people who could not attend, the U.S. Marine Band played. Finally, the event’s principal speaker, Edward Everett, was introduced. His address soared in rhetorical flourishes as he gave a long, carefully researched history of the Gettysburg battle. The crowd was enraptured and distracted by turns. Everett was a masterly speaker and knew precisely how to hold an audience, but for some reason, perhaps because most of his listeners were forced to stand during his oration, the crowd began to dwindle around its edges. Some people wandered toward the unfinished gravesites or to the slopes of the hillside and the crest of the ridge where the deadly fighting had taken place four months earlier. At last Everett finished his speech, and as he did, the strollers drifted back to the platform for the next installment of the program.¹¹ A poem composed for the occasion was sung as a hymn by the Baltimore Glee Club. Then Ward Lamon walked to the center of the platform and proudly introduced his friend, “the president of the United States.” Precisely what occurred during the next two or three minutes cannot be known. It is certain that Lincoln delivered his brief remarks, or at least a version of what we today know as the Gettysburg Address, but the details are lost to history. As John Hay matter of factly recorded in his diary, “The President in a firm free way, with more grace than is his wont said his half dozen words of consecration and the music wailed and we went home through crowded and cheering streets. And all the particulars are in the daily papers.”¹² We do know that there was—and is—more to the Gettysburg Address than Hay reports. If indeed some magic did take place, a spiritual connection that touched the soul of America, then presumably we should be able to account for its impact and significance in the reactions of the thousands who heard him speak that afternoon.

Yet, when it comes to the accounts of those who claimed to be present (including dignitaries, soldiers like George Reynolds, ordinary citizens, and newspaper correspondents), everyone, to a remarkable degree, left differing records of what they had seen and heard. None of Lincoln’s other speeches—either as president or in his long political career leading up to the election of 1860— leaves more frustratingly inconsistent evidence than the Gettysburg Address. The most glaring inconsistencies surround the crowd’s reaction, with amazingly different accounts purporting that those in attendance responded either enthusiastically or stoically, with great emotion or with great silence.

Some observers said that the crowd ardently received Lincoln’s words, even to the point of interrupting the address with applause. Benjamin B. French, who wrote the glee club’s hymn, claimed

Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s unofficial bodyguard and marshal-in-chief of the day’s events, had the honor of introducing his friend, “the president of the United States.”

that Lincoln’s “every word at Gettysburg” was met by a “hurricane of applause.” Someone else remembered that when the president had finished, the crowd lustily gave him three cheers. Joseph L. Gilbert, the Associated Press correspondent who transcribed Lincoln’s words, included in brackets the five places where the crowd interrupted Lincoln with applause, although many years later Gilbert acknowledged that he had inserted them arbitrarily and could not remember any clapping at all. Other witnesses, however, were absolutely sure that no applause occurred. W.H. Cunningham, a reporter, maintained that there was perfect silence during and after the speech. He was confident the audience had uttered “not a word, not a cheer, not a shout.”¹³ But how could that be possible? How could some witnesses remember thunderous applause and others recall only a hush? Historians have not helped to solve the contradiction. They tend to take sides, some favoring the idea of a silent crowd, others believing that the audience erupted in deafening cheers. But if we consider that both stunned silence and excited applause are acts of extreme emotion, we begin to see them as vital clues about the impact of Lincoln’s speech.

What the evidence really says is that those who heard Lincoln’s speech reacted emotionally—that is, with what they individually considered to be the appropriate emotional response—to the presi-

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dent’s words. Some people apparently clapped enthusiastically; others regarded the address as a solemn expression of sentiment and stood in silent awe of the man and his eloquence. Such a large crowd, whatever its actual number, could not all have heard everything Lincoln said; the audience was spread out over a wide area adjacent to Gettysburg’s local burial ground, the Evergreen Cemetery, and many people stood beyond the range even of Lincoln’s powerful tenor voice. Many reporters found a convenient place near the speakers’ platform, but others were scattered hither and yon.

What individuals heard and saw from their own vantage points, good or bad, could not be exactly the same. That’s asking too much of history and of human beings. Yet the common thread is that the emotional response to Lincoln’s address was deep, visceral, and vast.

Already the day had been filled with emotion. The crowd was in high spirits. Reverend Stockton’s soulful prayer had brought tears to many an eye. Edward Everett’s speech had stirred patriotism and sadness, pride and sorrow. And now Lincoln, with a slight 272 words, had touched the deepest chord of all.

It was so deep, in fact, that it took many listeners completely by surprise.

When Lincoln stopped talking, some were not sure if he had finished and, according to one eyewitness, “the awe-struck people, apparently deeply moved, gave no sign of approval or appreciation.”¹⁴ Captain Oliver N. Goldsmith, ordered to Gettysburg with his regiment to participate in the ceremony, asserted with confidence that he had heard Lincoln’s speech and that “there were no frills” about it. “We understood him and listened intently to those profound words,” Goldsmith told a newspaper reporter in 1913. One official who participated in the ceremony said he spoke afterward with a soldier who maintained that Lincoln’s speech was “one of the most impressive and touching addresses he ever heard.” This official, probably an officer in a regiment that marched in the pre-ceremony parade, surmised that the soldiers in the audience “appreciated its tender, sympathetic character better than those who took no part in suppressing the rebellion.” The officer affirmed that he had “never seen an orator … command such an intense interest. It was one of those supreme moments, when a person feels he is taking part in a scene which will live in history and be referred to by one’s children’s children.”¹⁵ Some who heard the address but reported little or no reaction by the audience concluded—unfairly or not—that Lincoln’s speech had been a failure. Ward Lamon, Lincoln’s close friend and the event’s marshal-in-chief, later claimed that “the lack of hearty demonstrations of approval immediately afterward, were taken by Mr. Lincoln as certain proof that it was not well received,” although it seems unlikely that Lincoln thought his speech as much a failure as Lamon maintained.¹⁶ According to Lamon, Lincoln turned to him after speaking and said, “Lamon, that speech won’t scour. It is a flat failure and the people are disappointed.” Lamon also claimed that while on the platform—with Lincoln out of earshot—Seward and Everett both called the speech a failure. Finally, Lamon said,

“It was one of those supreme moments, when a person feels he is taking part in a scene which will live in history and be referred to by one’s children’s children.”

after they had returned to Washington, Lincoln remarked, “I tell you Hill, that speech fell on the audience like a wet blanket. I ought to have prepared it with more care.” Most historians believe, however, that Lamon invented Lincoln’s disappointment. Evidence shows, in fact, that Everett marvelled at Lincoln’s words and later told him so in a note. The other attributions seem to be products of Lamon’s overly active imagination.¹⁷ In any case, some people were so taken aback, either by Lincoln’s brevity or his words’ emotional power, that they did not respond in any outward manner. “It was a sad hour,” recalled a Gettysburg man. “Any tumultuous wave of applause would have been out of place.”¹⁸ Trying to recall the reaction, Philip H. Bikle, a professor at Gettysburg College, wrote: “I do not remember that there was any applause, but I do remember that there was surprise that his speech was so short.” Edward McPherson, a former Pennsylvania congressman, asserted that the address was “imperfectly heard and faintly appreciated.” A New York reporter admitted that it was “probably not appreciated to its true merit by the audience, many of whom had dispersed over the battle-field.”¹⁹ Senator Cornelius Cole thought the audience had missed the

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A view of the sprawling crowd that attended the dedication ceremony.

Some wandered the cemetery rounds during the speeches, unable to get close enough to the speakers’ platform to hear the words.

The Gettysburg Address Although newspapers published “verbatim” texts of the words that Lincoln spoke on November 19, 1863, they differed wildly from those we know and recite today. And Lincoln himself produced five copies of the speech in his own hand, each with minor variations.

Most historians agree that the copy Lincoln read from on the platform was what is now known as the Nicolay Copy, or First Draft, which the president gave as a gift to his secretary, John G. Nicolay, who accompanied him to Gettysburg. The other extant copies are the Hay Copy, also called the Second Draft; the Everett Copy, a gift from Lincoln to Edward Everett, the featured speaker that day; the Bancroft Copy, which Lincoln wrote at the request of historian George Bancroft; and the Bliss Copy, the only one signed and dated by Lincoln, which was written out in March 1864 for Colonel Alexander Bliss, a publisher who wanted to issue a facsimile of the address.

The Bliss text, printed and pictured below, has become the standard version—the one memorized by students, emblazoned on the Lincoln Memorial, and still displayed prominently in the Lincoln Room at the White House. –GWL

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (TOP); WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION ( WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION): 1810

Address delivered at the dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg.

whole performance. When Lincoln took his seat so suddenly after his short address, Cole remembered, “it was such a disappointment to everybody that there was no applause of any kind.”²⁰ But, according to more than one observer, “at intervals there were roars of applause” amid the great solemnity. Mostly, the crowd was overcome by emotion—quiet gravity for some, earnest applause or tears for others. One schoolgirl had a very personal reaction. “Cry? Of course I cried,” she said in an interview long after the event. “Every word spoken [by the president] was so real, so full of meaning. When there came to our ears the words, ‘The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated this ground far above our power to add or detract,’ it meant all those ghastly days of fighting and dying.” She stood near a neighbor, a mother who had lost two sons to the war. “I cried for her,” she said solemnly, “as I can cry now when I think about it.”²¹ One Union officer, Major A.H. Nickerson of the 8th Ohio Infantry, was powerfully—and spiritually—moved. As the president spoke, the officer realized that they all stood “almost immediately over the place where I had lain and seen my comrades torn in fragments by the } CONT. ON P. 101

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.

Abraham Lincoln

NOVEMBER 19, 1863

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&Authors Angels of the Lost Cause: How a Beloved Novel About Gettysburg Gets Its History Wrong

BY THOM BASSETT MICHAEL SHAARA’S 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels—a riveting account of the Battle of Gettysburg, told from numerous, richly imagined perspectives—is one of the most important and influential works of Civil War literature.¹ It inspired Ken Burns’ seminal documentary The Civil War, and historian James McPherson calls it “a superb recreation of the Battle of Gettysburg.” Scholar Stephen B. Oates is even more effusive: “If I had to choose just one book that best captures the Civil War, this would be it.”² These praises are understandable—and justly deserved—when considering The Killer Angels’ undoubted literary merit. The novel’s battle scenes, especially its portrayals of Little Round Top and Pickett’s Charge, are vivid and compel-

ling. Historical figures including Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain come to life and capture readers’ imaginations in Shaara’s skillful depictions. The novel portrays in unforgettable ways the courage, loyalties, and doubts of men caught in the crucible of war.

But The Killer Angels is in another important sense a failure. The novel’s interpretation of the Civil War—in McPherson’s words, “what the war was about, and what it meant”—is infected throughout with Lost Cause mythologizing and historical distortions.

How we retell the story of the Civil War profoundly affects more than our collective memory of the most critical period in American history. Shaara’s novel fosters a Lost Cause mis-

MY FAVORITE GETTYSBURG BOOK

GETTYSBURG: THE SECOND DAY

by Harry W. Pfanz (1987)

“Combines great storytelling and deep research that vividly brings the horror of Civil War combat to life.”

ERIC J. WITTENBERG, AUTHOR OF PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND (2006) AND ONE CONTINUOUS FIGHT (2008)

AT FIRST GLANCE The Killer Angels might not seem to be entangled in ideological questions, given that Shaara claims in the novel’s preface that he wrote The Killer Angels for the same reason that Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage: “to know what it was like to be there, what the weather was like, what men’s faces looked like” (XIII).

Shaara also says that, because of conflicting accounts of the battle and the war itself, he “avoid[ed] historical opinions” by going back “primarily to the words of the men themselves, their letters, and other documents” (XIII). In other words, Shaara tells us that he is offering a literary re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, similar to The Red Badge of Courage’s depiction of the Battle of Chancellors-

PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK MITCHELL/MODUS OPERANDI DESIGN

remembering of the Civil War, and thus fails to contribute to a historically accurate and morally sound national self-understanding. If we as a people are serious about a better understanding of the Civil War and its enduring legacies, we would do well to remove The Killer Angels from its prominent, privileged place in the canon of Civil War literature.

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&Authors

ville. This promise, along with the story’s multiple Union and Confederate narrators, implies that The Killer Angels will have an even-handed approach.

But Shaara gives much more than a gripping account of men caught in the confusing, terrifying welter of war. Instead, characters offer explanations for their actions, contemplate the reasons behind the conflict, and consider Gettysburg’s legacy.³ The Killer Angels is, then, a novel of interpretation. And that interpretation too often and too thoroughly perpetuates Lost Cause lies.

Historian Alan T. Nolan does not overstate the matter when he says that the history of the Civil War “is surrounded by vast mythology … generally referred to by historians today as ‘the Lost Cause.’” Arising from southern partisans’ postwar need to rationalize their tragic and destructive attempt to secede, the resulting highly tendentious revision of their prewar history and motives “became a national phenomenon. In the popular mind, the Lost Cause represents the national memory of the Civil War; it has been substituted for the history of the war.”⁴ A careful reading of The Killer Angels reveals a thorough substitution of Lost Cause mythology for history. This essay will not recount every distortion, but will instead focus on how Lost Cause advocates dealt with race and slavery. A novel that conveys Lost Cause lies about these critical issues fails as even a fictional exploration of the war.

THE ATTACK ON historical truth starts with denials that slavery caused the Civil War. “No argument in the Lost Cause formula became more an article of faith,” explains historian David W. Blight, “than the disclaimer against slavery as the cause of the war.”⁵ Aware of the moral stain that slavery left in the war’s aftermath, former Confederates tried to shed that stigma by moving other reasons for secession to the forefront.⁶ In The Killer Angels, slavery plays no part in any southerner’s reasons for fighting. Instead, Confederate after Confederate emphatically denies any ties between slavery and secession. In a scene that takes place on the evening of June 30, 1863, Lieutenant Colonel Moxley thunders at British army observer Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Fremantle that the South was fighting for “freedom from the rule of what is to us a foreign government” (65). Later in the same scene Major General George Pickett blithely explains that secession was like an individual resigning from a club to preserve his privacy (66). Brigadier General James L. Kemper is amazed that Fremantle could think the war was over slavery (66), just as Brigadier General Lewis Armistead is disgustedly incredulous that Europeans could believe such a thing (255). A group of unnamed Confederate officers chat and agree over what “a shame it was that so many people seemed to think it was slavery that brought on the war, when it was really a question of the Constitution” (66). A

THE HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR “IS SURROUNDED

BY VAST MYTHOLOGY… GENERALLY REFERRED TO BY HISTORIANS TODAY AS ‘THE LOST CAUSE.’”

MY FAVORITE GETTYSBURG BOOK

PICKETT’S CHARGE: A MICROHISTORY OF THE FINAL ATTACK AT GETTYSBURG, JULY 3, 1863

by George R. Stewart (1959)

“Elegantly written, the book’s dramatic tension sustains itself from first page to last, despite the fact that the reader knows the tragic outcome of the Confederate assault on Cemetery Ridge.”

GLENN W. LAFANTASIE, AUTHOR OF TWILIGHT AT LITTLE ROUND TOP (2005) AND GETTYSBURG REQUIEM: THE LIFE AND LOST CAUSES OF CONFEDERATE COLONEL WILLIAM C. OATES (2006)

Union officer relates that captured Confederate infantrymen declared “they wasn’t fightin’ for no slaves, they were fighting for their ‘rats.’ It finally dawned on me that what the feller meant was their ‘rights’” (170-71).

Nothing in The Killer Angels suggests that these denials are intended to be understood by the reader ironically; these passages stand as straightforward expressions of the characters’ convictions. Shaara thereby accomplishes in the middle of the war what southern partisans achieved only afterward: the stripping away from history of slavery as the single most important cause of the conflict.

The depiction of Robert E. Lee is similarly problematic.

While The Killer Angels departs from Lost Cause orthodoxy in depicting Lee as greatly hampered by a heart ailment and unaccountably fatalistic during the Gettysburg Campaign, other facets of Shaara’s portrayal cleanse this most iconic of southern figures of the taint of slavery. Shaara says that Lee “does not own slaves nor believe in slavery” (XVI), but this claim is seriously misleading.

Lee did not personally own slaves, but he also delayed manumitting the Custis family slaves, as required by his father-in-law’s will, for as long as possible in order to financially benefit his sons. More important, while he was troubled by the burdens he thought slavery imposed on both blacks and whites, he also considered the institution part of a divine plan for the betterment of blacks. In fact, historian Michael Fellman persuasively argues that when viewed in proper historical context, Lee’s theologically grounded passive acceptance of slavery “was not an antislavery

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COURTESY OF THE MICHAEL SHAARA PAPERS, BROWARD COUNTY LIBRARY, BIENES MUSEUM OF THE MODERN BOOK, FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA

but a proslavery position.”⁷ Furthermore, Shaara’s Lee justifies the war in starkly Lost Cause terms. He claims that the war was “forced” upon the South (183). After the fighting concludes on July 2, Lee mournfully ruminates on his decision to violate his oath to the Constitution. His ennobling explanation would please any Lost Causer: “He fought for his people, for the children and the kin, and not

Michael Shaara (second from right) at a February 17, 1976, event at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he was honored for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels.

even the land, because not even the land was worth the war, but people were, as wrong as they were … they were his own, he belonged with his own” (263).

Later, Lee also reflects on why southerners were fighting, and reassures himself that his soldiers “came here ready to die for what they believed in, for their homes and their honor” (268).

It’s true that Shaara has Lee’s trusted subordinate, Lieu-

tenant General James Longstreet, think to himself at one point, “The war was about slavery, all right” (255). But the narrator then immediately states that slavery is not why Longstreet is fighting. The passage reflects Lost Cause mythology in a subtle but important way.

Many postbellum southern partisans denied the war was fought over slavery by describing the practice in terms that left it “an

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&Authors

impersonal force in history ... beyond all human responsibility….

[N]o Southerner fought in its defense, and no Northerner died to end it.”⁸ A similar view of slavery and responsibility occurs here. Longstreet acknowledges that slavery is connected to the war, but the narrator decouples Longstreet from any moral liability that would flow from fighting on its behalf. In the moral universe of The Killer Angels, slavery does exist, but because not a single southerner fights to preserve or extend the institution, no southerner bears responsibility for its evils or the war’s bloodshed and destruction.

Shaara’s Confederate characters aren’t the sole representatives of Lost Cause mythology.

Union colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, arguably the novel’s central character, is the only one to express discomfiting views about blacks. For Chamberlain, the escaped and wounded slave found by men from his 20th Maine Infantry verges on inhuman. The slave has to Chamberlain a “[l]ook of animal strength” (168) and his eyes roll “horselike” in terror (171). Moreover, when he is near the slave, Chamberlain acknowledges “a crawly hesitation, not wanting to touch him … a flutter of unmistakable revulsion” (169).

In a conversation with his regiment’s veteran sergeant, Kilrain, Chamberlain soon recalls his angry prewar confrontation with a visiting slaveowner, in which Chamberlain objected to the idea that “a Negro was not a man” (177). This conflict between Chamberlain’s beliefs and his experience with the escaped slave is a deeply compelling and realistic moment in The Killer Angels.

But it also pulls off the remark-

Michael Shaara

MY FAVORITE GETTYSBURG BOOK

GETTYSBURG: A JOURNEY IN TIME

by William Frassanito (1975)

able feat of transferring problems of race entirely to the Union side of the conflict. If a central aim of Lost Cause mythologizing is to eliminate African Americans as a direct cause of the war, this illustrates a method to achieve it: Draw attention away from the southern form of racism that led to secession.

But Chamberlain serves as a mouthpiece for Lost Cause thinking in another, equally disturbing way: the extolling, as Blight puts it, of Confederates as “exemplary men” who through no fault of their own chose “the wrong, or doomed, side in a great war.”⁹ In the novel’s final pages Chamberlain remembers witnessing Pickett’s Charge: It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. No book or music would have that beauty.

He did not understand it: a mile of men flowing slowly, steadily, inevitably up the long green ground, dying all the while, coming to kill you, and the shell bursts appearing above them like instant white flowers, and the flags all tipping and fluttering, and dimly you could hear the music and the drums, and then you could hear the officers screaming, and yet even above your own fear came the sensation of unspeakable beauty (342).

“This book shattered my image of Civil War photographers as men who simply captured the past. They were inventors of history.”

PETER S. CARMICHAEL, DIRECTOR OF THE CIVIL WAR INSTITUTE AT GETTYSBURG COLLEGE

GETTYSBURG JULY 1

by David Martin (1995)

“My favorite treatment of what is, in my opinion, the most dynamic and thought stimulating of the three days of fighting. It possesses both the depth that serious students of this battle demand and a presentation accessible enough to draw in budding Gettysburg readers like I was when I first read it.”

ANDREW WAGENHOFFER, EDITOR OF THE WEBSITE CIVIL WAR BOOKS AND AUTHORS

A moment later, Chamberlain’s brother Thomas, a junior officer in his regiment, wonders how the Confederates could fight so hard for slavery, prompting Chamberlain to realize that he “had forgotten the Cause. When the guns began firing he had forgotten it completely. It seemed very strange now to think of morality, or that minister long ago, or the poor runaway black” (343). He then looks at the carefully laid out rows of Confederate dead and feels “an extraordinary admiration. It was as if they were his own men who had come up the hill and he had been with them as they came…. He felt a violent pity” (344).

These evocative passages show why The Killer Angels is so well regarded as an account of the war experience. But they are also deeply problematic, because even if Shaara casts a reconciliationalist light by blurring Chamberlain’s sense of divide between the two armies, Lost Cause themes are also present as Chamberlain pays tribute to the southern attackers: They are heroic, honorable, and worthy of “extraordinary admiration” (344).

The cause of the war—the attempt to establish a separate country built on enslaving human beings—becomes irrelevant to Chamberlain as he looks upon these fallen foes. Chamberlain is no longer gazing upon men pledged to destroying the nation he was fighting to preserve, since Chamberlain now imagines himself marching alongside them. It’s hard to imagine a more valorizing depiction of the Confederate war effort.

Chamberlain’s sense of having been among the charging Confederates also serves as a powerful metaphor for how rec-

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onciliation was co-opted by Lost Cause proponents. The story of how, as Blight puts it, “Southerners found they could transform loss on the battlefield into a reunion on terms largely of their own choosing” is a complicated one, and I will not summarize it here. What matters is The Killer Angels’ final scene shows Chamberlain literally forgetting “the Cause,” the fundamental moral distinctions between the sides, and the slaves whose fate had been the reason for the war. The effect is to equalize the North and South as participants in the conflict.¹⁰

EVEN IF The Killer Angels represents a Lost Cause interpretation of the war, is it unfair to hold a work of historical fiction to the same standards as nonfiction history? After all, the objection might run, Shaara is an artist, not a historian, and thus is entitled—as he declares in the novel’s preface—to interpret characters as he sees fit (XIII).

But Shaara exceeds that license when he so seriously contradicts the known and established history of the war.

In other words, when artists portray historical episodes and figures imaginatively, when their art purports to re-create history, those interpretations must be, at a minimum, factually consistent with what is reliably known.

Furthermore, a work of art’s ideological content can be assessed independently from its aesthetic value. We rightly appreciate, for example, the cinematic significance and sophistication of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation while simultaneously rejecting it as a viable interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction due to its

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vile racism. (Of course, the film remains relevant as an example of how Americans have in the past understood the war and Reconstruction.)

The Killer Angels obviously does not set forth Lost Cause myths to the same extent as The Birth of a Nation. But the difference is one of degree, not type.

Furthermore, because the novel’s Lost Cause elements are entwined so thoroughly with some of the most revealing, resonant battlefield depictions in American literature, it’s easy to gloss over the distortions. Shaara might not have “consciously changed any fact” (XIII) pertaining to the fighting at Gettysburg itself, but he did indeed elide a host of important truths about the war’s causes and meaning.

Early in The Killer Angels Shaara describes the heart disease that is slowing killing

ENDNOTES 1

2

3

4

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (New York, 2003). All parenthetical page citations in the text are to this edition of the novel.

Ken Burns, “Four O’Clock in the Morning Courage,” in Ken Burns’s Civil War: Historians Respond (New York, 1996), 157; “My Favorite Historical Novel,” American Heritage 43 (October 1992): 102.

Craig A. Warren, Scars to Prove It: The Civil War Soldier and American Fiction (Kent, OH, 2009), 122.

Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History eds. Gary W. Gal-

lagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 12.

5

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 282.

6

Gary Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), 19.

7

Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York, 2000), 74.

8

Blight, Race and Reunion, 91.

9

Ibid., 358.

10 Ibid., 258, 264-66, 388.

Robert E. Lee, who would die in 1870 at the age of 63, as “a sick gray emptiness” filling his chest (74). This is an apt metaphor for the deeply injurious effects of the Lost Cause, even today, on our collective memory of the Civil War. There is no better time than the sesquicentennial period, with great public and scholarly attention focused on the ways in which the war continues to shape our national consciousness, to strive for an understanding that is free of the moral and historical rot of the Lost Cause.

Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels stands alongside Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Shelby Foote’s Shiloh as a remarkable literary depiction of the battlefield realities of the Civil War. But it is long past time to acknowledge that this book—filled with the misrepresentations, fabrications, and heavy sentimentality of the Lost Cause—is seriously deficient, and even harmful, as a fictional exploration of the causes and meaning of the conflict. Perhaps we are still awaiting a work of literature that captures the experiences of those who fought the Civil War while also remaining faithful to historical truths.

If so, then to rework Abraham Lincoln’s famous formulation from his December 1862 Annual Message to Congress, we as a people will do better when we can all imagine better.

THOM BASSETT,

a native of South Carolina who now lives in Rhode Island, is a lecturer in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University as well as a regular contributor to The New York Times’ “Disunion” Civil War blog. He is at work on a novel. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Michael Fellman.

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DISUNION

CONTINUED FROM P. 21

The Potomac River flooded and the shallow fords now impassable, the Texans had to wait in Maryland, risking a follow-up Union assault, until the waters receded.

Ten days later, with the rains still falling, the Texans decided they could wait no longer, and a brigade crossed into Falling Waters, Virginia, around dawn. As they arrived on shore they found Lee himself watching from atop his horse, Traveller. The Texans saw the general and “each soldier bared his head. There was no salute, no cheer and no word was spoken as the men marched silently by.”

The Texans fought for nearly two

BATTLEFIELD ECHOES CONTINUED FROM P. 29

(successful) audacity he previously displayed during the Seven Days Battles and at Chancellorsville blind him to reality on July 3? Was Lee truly the tactical master that so many histories have made him out to be, or does the seemingly senseless, or even suicidal, order for the assault negate all those previous victories? And as groups make the long, almost ceremonial walk in the footsteps of Pickett’s and Brigadier General J. Johnston Pettigrew’s divisions up to the rock wall marking the Union line, it is hard not to marvel at the tremendous task that was asked of soldiers from both sides that day. The scene serves as a permanent, sobering reminder that the boldest plan is not always the wisest.

It would be easier, perhaps, for military leaders to rely on books or films to teach lessons from past conflicts. But as Civil War historian Carol Reardon notes, historical memory is not always honest, and often incomplete.³ Generations of military

more years, mostly in Georgia and Tennessee. Lee would personally lead them in a desperate charge at the Battle of the Wilderness. Back once more in Virginia—ragged, starving, and down to their last bullets—just 600 of the 3,500 men who left Texas were still standing in uniform when Lee surrendered.

Hood surrendered with a small force in Mississippi on May 31, 1865, over a month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. His arm forever useless after Gettysburg, he died 14 years later, in New Orleans. Fort Hood, Texas, is named for him, and a 35-foot marble shaft stands as a memorial to the general—and his Texans—on the manicured grounds of the state capitol in Austin. writes for the McClatchyTribune syndicate, the Columbia Journalism Review and The New Republic.

RICHARD PARKER

men and women have learned through personal experience that there is no substitute for walking the ground, seeing as best as possible what the original participants saw, and searching for the how and why. Undoubtedly, Gettysburg National Battlefield Park will remain a favorite location to continue that search for generations to come.

CLAY MOUNTCASTLE,

a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, currently serves as the Professor of Military Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Duke University and is the author of Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (University Press of Kansas, 2009).

ENDNOTES 1

CMH Pub 70-21, The Staff Ride by William G. Robertson (Washington, 1987), 5.

2

Steven E. Woodworth, Beneath a Northern Sky: A Short History of the Gettysburg Campaign (Wilmington, DE, 2003), 99100.

3

Carol Reardon, “The Pickett’s Charge Nobody Knows,” in The Gettysburg Nobody Knows ed. by Gabor S. Boritt (New York, 1997), 136.

CASUALTIES OF WAR CONTINUED FROM P. 31

through both hips. But as the bullet went through him, Crawford took a mental inventory of his trousers and told his friends the truth: “Boys, I am ruined.”⁶ All of these men died at Gettysburg, and their ends were not pretty. Only generals get last words like “Strike the tent,” or “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Lieutenant colonels get last words like “Are you sure that is the order? Well, it is murder, but it’s the order.” And privates get last words like “Oh God! I am shot,” or “I am killed,” or the more plaintive “Who shall care for Mother now?”⁷ Other last words at Gettysburg were sadder still. At Plum Run Valley, just west of Little Round Top, a shell took off the arm of Samuel Spear, a private in the 42nd Pennsylvania Infantry. Like a squirrel half run over in a road, Spear sprang up and ran around in circles as blood spurted from his stump. “I won’t die, I won’t die,” he cried before keeling over and dying. The last words of Jonathan Leavitt were more typical. His feet and ankles crushed by a cannon ball, Leavitt lay on the field unattended for 40 hours, watching as his extremities turned into a black “mass of corruption.” When he was finally carried to the amputation table, a doctor “passed his knife through the mass of flesh and bones and left his feet and ankles on the stretcher.” Leavitt was “evidently aware of his critical condition, but anxious to live.” His last words were simply: “Shall I pull through, Doctor?”⁸ Then there were the men who tried to form last words but found, with mounting panic and confusion, that they could make only unintelligible noises. Shot through the heart, Charles Frederick Taylor had enough life and air left to raspingly ask for water. A comrade obliged but noted that with the first swallow “blood began to come from his mouth & he seemed to want to say something. All I could under-

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stand was ‘Mum’ ‘mum.’” “Nobody knows how dear Fred was to me,” Bayard Taylor wrote of his “Mum-mumming” brother. “Through him I knew what a brother’s love meant. I had brighter hopes for him than myself: he was better and nobler than I.”⁹ Gettysburg was a tragicomic slaughterhouse, a heart-rending Grand Guignol that wasn’t supposed to happen in America. Gettysburg was not fought by professional armies but by armies of professionals. Gettysburg is a boatman shot through the liver, a schoolteacher shot in the head, a locksmith whose brains are suddenly coating the regimental adjutant. Gettysburg is an armless man, left out to die and clinging to a branch by his stumps as a creek swells to wash him away. Gettysburg is a spinning shell fragment, driving a man’s cartridge box deep into his body and detonating it. Gettysburg is a limb-

less torso, lying on a rubber mat, shaking his head to wipe the tears from his face as fellow soldiers open and read him his final letter from home. Gettysburg is a wife, now a widow, crumpling her hand around her husband’s last words: “I dream of holding you again in my arms…. I pray for your good health and safety more than mine…. If I should die remember not the pain of our parting, but of the many joys of our union; remember not the hatred and mistrust that kills, but the love and trust that transcends and sustains. I shall write again tomorrow.”¹⁰ is Amanda and Greg Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia. He is the author or editor of four books on America in the Civil War era, including House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).

STEPHEN BERRY

ENDNOTES 1

J.T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities (Hartford, 1866), iii.

2

Ibid., 17.

3

Ibid., 19-20.

4

For the account of the regimental surgeon of the 108th New York, see Gregory A. Coco, Killed in Action: Eyewitness Accounts of the Last Moments of 100 Union Soldiers Who Died at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, 1992) [hereafter KIAU], 59.

5

On the death of Isaac Taylor, see Travis W. Busey and John W. Busey, Union Casualties at Gettysburg: A Comprehensive Record (Jefferson, NC, 2011), 316. On the death of Alfred Sofield, see Jeffrey J. and Loree L. Kowalis, Died at Gettysburg (Highstown, NJ, 1998), 220. On the death of Travis Maxey, see Warren Wilkinson and Steven E. Woodworth, Scythe of Fire: Through the Civil War with One of Lee’s Most Legendary Regiments (New York, 2002), 237.

6

On the death of Samuel Zook, see Kowalis, Died at Gettysburg, 15-21. On the death of James McCleary, see KIAU, 55. On the death of John Cranston, see Busey, Union Casualties at Gettysburg, 519. On the death of Robert Crawford, see Gregory A. Coco, Confederates Killed in Action at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, 2001) [hereafter KIAC], 90.

7

The lieutenant who questioned his superior—“Well, it is murder, but it is the order”— was Charles R. Mudge of the 2nd Massa-

chusetts. See Kowalis, Died at Gettysburg, 35. “Oh God! I am shot” were the final words of Second Lieutenant Silas A. Miller, Co. A, 12th United States Infantry. See KIAU, 73.

“I am killed” were the last words of Private James Johnston, Co. K, 4th Michigan. See KIAU, 44. “Who shall care for Mother now?” were the final words of Private William Purbeck, 5th Massachusetts Light Artillery.

See KIAU, 50.

8

On the death of Samuel Spear, see KIAU, 69.

On the death of Jonathan Leavitt, see KIAU, 79-80.

9

On the death of Charles Taylor, see KIAU, 58-59.

10 The boatman shot in the liver was John Tracy, born in Ireland and died of his wounds on July 5, 1863. See Busey, Union Casualties at Gettysburg, 513. The schoolteacher shot in the forehead was Joseph S. Corbin. See Busey, Union Casualties at Gettysburg, 511. The locksmith who lost his head was Douglas Fowler, killed instantly while deploying his regiment on July 1. See Busey, Union Casualties at Gettysburg, 31.

The limbless torso was an unknown Georgia infantry captain. See Coco, KIAC, 23-24.

The soldier who erroneously told his wife that he would “write again tomorrow” was Thomas O. Barri, a captain in the 11th U.S. Infantry. Barri was wounded early on July 2; he was being helped from the field when he was shot again. He died shortly after getting back to Union lines. See Kowalis, Died at Gettysburg, 247-249.

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This deeply researched, long-awaited work draws upon participant accounts from both sides to bring the reader minute-by-minute into the horrific fight, as Barksdale’s men crushed the Peach Orchard salient and marauded up to Cemetery Ridge. Barksdale himself— “the guiding spirit of the battle,” in Longstreet’s words—was killed at the apex of his advance. But the fight he had waged brought the Confederacy closer to total victory in the Civil War than it would ever see again.

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BADGE OF HONOR CONTINUED FROM P. 46

INSIDE

that the rumors were true. This test was substantially different, and orders of magnitude harder, than any offered before. Test-takers were about to face a bevy of questions about Civil War battles in the Western theater, far from those best known to Gettysburg experts; a new 12-point section on artillery that would wallop nearly everyone; a host of highly specific questions about the battlefield in more modern times, like the month and year John F. Kennedy had visited; and a few questions that seemed sort of random, like a “band of brothers” quote that had to be matched to its source, which turned out to be Shakespeare’s Henry V. Meanwhile, test questions about the “family tree” of the armies’ command structure ventured out onto smaller, more obscure branches.

During the test, I was standing in the hallway when a cluster of guides, huddled around a copy of the exam, came across one of those questions: “This brigade, composed of 10th GA, 50th GA, 51st GA, 53rd GA is commanded by ______.”

“Geez,” said guide Joe Mieczkowski, who placed No. 1 on the 2006 written exam. “Who is it?”

The other guides in the huddle weren’t sure.

“Not Doles, not Anderson, not Benning,” Mieczkowski whispered to himself. He pulled a pen and an old receipt from his shirt pocket and scribbled it down to look up later. (The answer was Brigadier General Paul Jones Semmes.) A number of guides would later tell Bell that if they’d taken this test, they doubt they would have made the cut.

The first person to leave was a burly, unemployed truck driver who preferred not to give his name. It was just 10:40 a.m. “It was hard,” he said, raking a hand through his beard. “I’m a buff, but all those details….” Someone had told him he’d need at least 92 percent right to even be in conten-

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tion. “I didn’t even answer 92 percent of the questions,” he muttered. Most test-takers took the full three hours, stumbling out at noon, exhausted. “I wasn’t in tears and I didn’t embarrass myself,” said Chris Bagley, the traveling nurse, sounding as though he’d worried both could happen. “I left myself in the room,” offered a wiped-out Chuck Burkell.

The minute that Larry Korczyk got home, he looked up the answers to every question he could remember, tallied the ones he missed, and started praying that the total was low enough to qualify him for the cut. “I think a lot of questions were designed to put some distance between candidates,” he said. “But with 151 people taking the test, they can afford to be that specific.” Back at the Doubleday Inn, Dave Clark and Mike Rupert sat by the fireplace, books and papers spread around them. “Who fired from the left during Pickett’s Charge? Wait, was it the left or the right?” asked Clark, flipping through his growing set of notes.

“It was the left. That was the 8th Ohio,” Rupert replied.

“Dammit! That’s a gimme,” Clark said. “Everyone else will get that right.”

The president who pardoned General Lee? Clark put Grant. Rupert guessed Nixon. It was Ford. And they’d both blown the Semmes question. Rupert’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t feel good, but who knows,” he said.

“The good news is that I learn something new each time I take the exam,” Clark told me later. “The bad news is there’s no way to prepare if the questions can be about anything.” He and Rupert were both convinced they’d done worse this time. But they figured everyone else had as well. When I left them, they’d started passing study tips back and forth. Each hoped there wouldn’t be another written exam in their future.

Yet they were quietly preparing for next time.

THE RESULTS LETTERS arrived a few days before Christmas. Twenty people had made the cut. While there were

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still three ties within the top 20, scores were not as tightly clustered: No. 1 got 96.1 percent of the 230 questions right (nine wrong), while No. 20 got 90 percent (23 wrong).

About 10 people answered fewer than 100 questions correctly. The lowest score was a catastrophic 11.

It was not good news for Mike Rupert: He had tied for No. 31. The new artillery section accounted for 10 of his 34 missed questions.

(Only about a dozen people got 12 of 12 points on that section, and “lots of people just blew it completely,” Bell reported.) Dave Clark, who had been so close in 2010, had tumbled down the rankings to No. 60. Chuck Burkell hadn’t been sure if he’d take the test a fourth time. By placing No. 7, he wouldn’t have to find out. Three other members of his study group had made it, too—one of them in the precarious No. 20 spot. But leaving their fifth man behind dampened their celebration. Steve Dunn, the Air Force master sergeant who stood first in line on test day? On his fifth try, he’d finally made the cut, too. He was No. 18.

The day the results arrived, Larry Korczyk was painting an old Victorian in downtown Gettysburg.

His wife spotted the letter in the mailbox and drove it over to him, and everyone in the building gathered around. The top scorer, the one who’d missed only nine questions—it was Korczyk.

He was No. 1. “My first reaction was pure shock, then an incredible sense of relief that I had even made the cut,” he said. His second reaction was more sobering. “My very next thought was, Oh my God. Now I’ve got to prepare for the oral.”

“YOU’RE THE ELITE of the elite right now,” Clyde Bell told the two women and 18 men seated around a Ushaped table in the Visitor Center’s education room.

Bob Kirby, superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park, upped it a notch.

“You’ve gone through the gauntlet,” he told them. “The Navy SEALs have nothing on you.” I felt as if I’d stumbled onto the set of Top Gun. I hadn’t. It was a frigid Saturday in early February, two months after the written test, and this was “Charm School”—an intensive, twoday boot camp for the top 20 guide candidates, designed to help them survive the dreaded oral exam.

There were familiar faces at the table, like Korczyk, Burkell, and Keith Toney, who’d guided for 10 years before moving to Kentucky to work for a hand-blended pipe tobacco company. His license had lapsed, so he’d tested again and tied for No. 13.

There was also Steve Mock, an audiologist obsessed with the battle since 1961, when he wandered the field for three days as a 13-year-old after his dad dropped him off on the way to a bowling tournament. There was Doug Douds, a young Marine lieutenant colonel and fighter pilot who works at the Pentagon, and Rogers Fred III, a veterinary oncologist and member of Chuck Burkell’s study group whose great-great-uncle had fought at Gettysburg with the 63rd Pennsylvania Infantry.

Fred remarked that it was easier to pass his medical boards than gain entry into this room. Also among the chosen were an orthopedic surgeon, a retired insurance underwriter, and a ponytailed chef named Gary.

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to Charm School was a momentous accomplishment, but in many ways it was easier than what lay ahead.

The oral exam sounded simple. One by one, in the order in which they’d placed on the test, candidates would have two chances to deliver a twohour battlefield tour to Bell and whatever licensed guide served as his co-examiner. But memorizing a zillion facts and bringing the battle to life for tourists who may never have heard of Lee or Meade are vastly different skill sets. Indeed, this is the great irony of the testing process: Achieving a stellar score on the written test in no way determines whether a family of four from Duluth will like having you in their car for two hours, or if you’ll be able to engage and excite them about what they’re seeing. “These are some of the smartest people in the world on the Battle of Gettysburg,” said John Zervas, one of a dozen guides serving as Charm School instructors. “But to pass the oral, they need to take all that knowledge and throw it away.” If historical statistics held, half of them wouldn’t be able to.

Most Gettysburg visitors know almost nothing about the Civil War— and Bell and the guides had two days to get that message through to the 20 minutiae-mongers fanned out in front of them. Guide George Newton put it this way: “You are not going to be talking to Civil War buffs.” He held up a two-inch-thick book of detailed battlefield maps in one hand, and a standard Gettysburg brochure, which folded out to a simple map of the field, in the other. “Your job is not to impart everything you know about the battle,” he said, dropping the thick book and raising aloft the flimsy brochure. “You have to take everything you know and move it down to this level. You can’t dive into the retreat of Humphrey’s division with a group tour. You can’t say the word ‘flank’ and not explain it.”

Added Bell: “Not everyone cares how

many buttons General Lee was wearing on July 2.”

While guides are required to cover all the basics of the battle during their tours, they get to choose everything from the route they drive to which stories they tell. But that freedom often spells trouble for nascent guides. “There are so many ways to get twisted around out there,” explained Zervas. To help candidates with this problem, Bell had asked them to bring an outline of their oral exam tour to Charm School for instructors to review. Many of those outlines were choked with detail.

“You’re going to be pressed for time more than you realize,” guide Jim Hessler told a 30-year-old IT specialist from York, Pennsylvania, crossing out whole sections of his 31-page, single-spaced outline. “When it comes to Lee, it’s 56, from Virginia, in the army 20 years when the war broke out. Boom, you’re done.”

Even harder to impart were the softer skills of guiding—things like approachability, building rapport with tourists, and the art of good storytelling. Even a candidate’s appearance and overall driving ability would be graded during the oral exam—and Bell has flunked people on these criteria alone. Once a candidate passes the oral exam, their very next tour is with paying visitors—so there is no on-the-job training. Moreover, their skills are never reevaluated, which is why they have to be good right out of the gate. “You either have the interpersonal skills or you don’t,” Bell said.

Those who didn’t would not make it past him.

Bell also uses the oral exam to test candidates’ ability to handle the stresses of a real tour. Can they flow with visitors’ questions and interests, or are they too rigid? To that end, Bell and his co-examiner would show up at each exam pretending to be tourists from two different states that had regiments at the battle. Candidates would need to personalize their tours accordingly, making sure to cover the experiences of those states’ soldiers at Gettysburg. This forces candidates to adjust their tour—even their whole route—in that moment, and think

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on their feet. But that isn’t the only curveball. “I’ll often ask questions that may have no direct relation to the battle—or, for lack of a better word, ‘dumbass’ questions, which people do ask,” Bell said. “I’m looking for how they react. They need to be prepared for anything.”

The guides at Charm School could attest to that. Some visitors challenge everything they say, or are too distracted by squirming children to even take in their stories. Others ask odd questions, like what was growing in Gettysburg’s fields in the 1860s (mainly soybeans) or the species of a particular tree. “You want to talk about Heath coming over the hill, but they want to know what bird that is,” said guide Dennis Conroy. Andy Donahue—one of about 15 women on the force and its top cavalry expert— seemed a magnet for unusual tours.

Once, a visitor insisted that Donahue give a tour to her dog, Millie. (“I pulled out every Gettysburg dog story I knew.”) Another time, Donahue climbed into a van to give a tour only to learn that all its passengers were blind. They asked her to help them see the battlefield through her eyes. She

had them out of the vehicle a lot, feeling cannons and touching the rocks of Devil’s Den. They loved it. Sometimes, a guide will hop into the car of a fellow diehard—and these are the moments they live for. “If they point to a statue and say, ‘That’s General Rhodes,’ you can open it up full throttle,” said guide Rich Kohr.

Throughout Charm School, Larry Korczyk had pen and paper out, taking neat and careful notes at every turn. He had spent countless hours on the battlefield. Yet until a few weeks earlier, he’d never taken a general twohour tour—the very kind he hoped to soon be delivering. So he’d gone out with Hessler, quickly learning just how much detail he would need to drop from his spiel. “Jim never mentioned more than 10 or 15 generals by name, and none below division level,” Korczyk said, with a tinge of awe in his voice. During one of Charm School’s final exercises, Hessler drove Korczyk and one other candidate out to the battlefield for a similar tour. Hessler was the last guide to pass his oral exam on the very first try—11 years ago. He is also the guide force’s unrivaled expert on General Dan Sickles,

even penning a 490-page biography of him. Yet during the tour, he managed to cover Sickles’ controversial refusal to occupy Little Round Top, General Meade’s reaction to that decision, and the flow of fighting that followed in one minute, 58 seconds. Boom, you’re done.

Some candidates would wait months—even as long as two years— before facing their oral exam, depending on the force’s need for new guides.

But Korczyk had only four weeks.

Knowing this, Hessler loaded his tour with practical tips, like what Korczyk could talk about if he got stuck at one of Gettysburg’s notoriously long red lights during his exam. He also drove out to Culp’s Hill—a wooded, difficultto-interpret area of the battlefield that was another prime spot for oral exam screw-ups. The drive itself—down a lonely stretch of residential road with not a monument or marker in sight— was part of the problem. “This is an awfully long road,” said Korczyk, setting down his notebook. Getting caught out here with nothing to say and nothing to point toward could spell disaster.

Hessler had sug } CONT. ON P. 98

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be from Alabama. Instead, it was Indiana and Mississippi. “There were only two regiments from Indiana at BADGE OF HONOR Gettysburg—the 19th and the 27th— CONTINUED FROM P. 97 so I covered them well,” he said. But he missed one location for General gestions. The road had been a hotbed William Barksdale’s Mississippi Briof activity during the battle, the same gade—along Cemetery Ridge, near the road the Union army had used to move Pennsylvania State Memorial. “Barksmen from its right flank to its left. dale’s brigade had moved northeast to“Or maybe mention how it used to be ward where the memorial now stands, heavily wooded back here, and then at which time they ran into a brigade talk about how the park is clearing of New Yorkers that stymied their atnon-historical tree growth,” Hessler tack. I should have brought that into offered. the storyline.”

“That’s great,” Korczyk replied, Korczyk didn’t pass. But he did and wrote it all down. as well as anybody does on their first try. He completed his tour in ON A SUNDAY MORNING in early two hours and 20 minutes—just five March, Korczyk minutes over the took his oral exam. limit. The examinHe drove his route ers liked his narrabeforehand, maktive transitions, and ing sure the roads his four out-of-thewere open and car stops—at Oak clouds didn’t obscure Most Gettysburg Hill, the Mississippi visitors know almost the landmarks he State Memorial, Litplanned to point out. nothing about the tle Round Top, and Civil War. As guide He wore a new pair the Angle—were George Newton says: of pants—gray, like well handled. He’d “You are not going the guides wear— also incorporated to be talking to Civil and “typical black Culp’s Hill into the guide shoes,” also re- War buffs. You can’t tour without getsay the word ‘flank’ cently purchased. ting sidelined—a and not explain it.”

Clyde Bell and huge pitfall averted. battlefield guide Afterward, Bell and Bobby Housh met Korczyk at the Housh spent an hour with Korczyk Visitor Center, casting themselves as dissecting the tour and making rectourists from the outset. Throughout, ommendations. “Believe me, I’ll take Bell intentionally acted spacey and all the lessons learned and come back distracted, testing Korczyk’s ability to and do better,” Korczyk promised. stay on course despite his antics. “A “I’ll be prepared.” couple of times he just wandered away They gave him three weeks. He while I was talking,” recalled Korcused them to study the Mississippi zyk. “He’d start touching the cannons, Brigade’s regimental strengths and saying, ‘Is this a cannon? What kind losses and all but memorize Barksof cannon is this?’ The whole time we dale’s biography. “I canvassed every were in the car, he was purposely not site where Mississippians ever laid a paying attention to me, just no eye foot,” he said. He spent hours giving contact at all.” Meanwhile, Housh was practice tours to guides and fellow hitting him with serious questions, en- candidates, trying to add new congaging him on every detail. “If I talked tent without blowing past his time about a brigade, he would ask, ‘How limit. many men were in that brigade?’” said For Korczyk’s second oral, Bell and Korczyk. “It was almost like good cop, Housh played the same roles. Korczyk bad cop.” wore the same gray pants. This time, Korczyk had convinced himself that he passed. It was his final hurdle. A at least one of his “tourists” would few weeks later he was back on the

battlefield, a distinctive patch on his left shoulder and a nine-point star shining on his belt. “It’s like a badge of honor, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “It’s a badge of honor.”

The candidate that followed Korczyk “flamed out,” failing both attempts. The next four have taken their first oral. None passed it. Chuck Burkell remains on deck, waiting for his first chance, which will likely come this fall. In Pittsburgh, Mike Rupert is already studying for a test that he can only hope will be offered again in two years.

One night, back when we were both staying at the Doubleday, Rupert approached me toting an earmarked copy of Maine at Gettysburg, a thick book of speeches dedicating the state’s many battlefield monuments, in his hand. He wanted to share part of a speech by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, commander of the 20th Maine Infantry at Gettysburg, that helped explain what had happened to him that day at the Pennsylvania State Memorial, the day he fell in love with Gettysburg.

“This is the end of Chamberlain speaking,” he said, clearing his throat. “‘In great deeds, something abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger…. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.’”

This was why Rupert would never give up. His perseverance was not about passing a test. It was about honoring the vision that had passed into his soul. It was for the privilege of shepherding the heart-drawn across the field. “And so the epic quest shall continue,” he told me. “I’ll keep taking the test forever, if that’s how long it takes.” is a freelance writer and editor based in San Francisco.

JENNY JOHNSTON

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MAD DAN SICKLES

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

CONTINUED FROM P. 55

some closed-door maneuvering from Dan Sickles) opened hearings into the Gettysburg battle. The first witness was Sickles, who insisted that Meade had deliberately conducted matters “to prevent a decisive attack upon General Lee.” Sickles gave his knife another twist on March 12, 1864—a week after Meade himself appeared before the committee—with a sensational 4,370-word article in the New York Herald that accused Meade of ignoring “the repeated warnings of that sagacious officer, General Sickles.” It was signed only HISTORICUS, but few people doubted that it had been written by Dan himself. Meade blazingly demanded a court of inquiry “to ascertain whether Major-General Sickles has authorized or indorses this communication,” but the War Department declined to intervene, and after several back-and-forths in the Herald, the controversy finally burned itself out.²¹ Dan Sickles wasn’t done yet. Sickles outlived Meade—in fact, he outlived all the other senior Union officers at Gettysburg—and died in 1914 after attending the great 50th anniversary celebrations of the battle. In between, Sickles managed to get himself re-elected to Congress and appointed as American minister to Spain (where it was rumored he had an affair with Queen Isabella II). He also sponsored the legislation that converted the Gettysburg battlefield into a federally owned preserve. He never ceased promoting his own self-complimentary interpretation of the battle: that the “real” battle had been fought on July 2; that the III Corps had sacrificed itself to save the Army of the Potomac; that George Meade had nearly betrayed the Union cause by planning to skulk, George McClellan-like, out of the fight until the all-seeing Sickles forced him to do the right thing. And he never ceased enjoying the adulation of his old III Corps veterans, of Congress (which bestowed the Medal of Honor on him in 1897), or of New York City (which gave him

a state funeral, with thousands lining Fifth Avenue).²² But unlike the other Union major generals at Gettysburg, there is no monument to Daniel Edgar Sickles on the Gettysburg battlefield.

Perhaps that is because no one could quite swallow the Sickles story completely in the end—or maybe because, as the story goes, the money raised for

the monument had been embezzled by Mad Dan himself.

ALLEN C. GUELZO

is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, and the author of Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford, 2012).

His newest work is Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Knopf, 2013).

Daniel Sickles’ coffin is carried from the cathedral during his funeral in New York City on May 8, 1914.

ENDNOTES 1

Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Harriet E. Smith, ed. (Berkeley, CA, 2010), 1:288, 291.

2

James A. Hessler, Sickles at Gettysburg: Sickles at Gettysburg: The Controversial Civil War General Who Committed Murder, Abandoned Little Round Top, and Declared Himself the Hero of Gettysburg (El Dorado, CA, 2009), 1-3; Thomas Keneally, American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles (New York, 2002), 127-128; Strong, diary entry for May 17, 1863, in Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins (New York, 1952), 3:323; “Biographical Sketch of Hon. D.E. Sickles,” Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1859.

3

Hessler, Sickles at Gettysburg, 14, 17, 25, 27; “Speech of John Graham, Esq.” (April 9, 1859), in Trial of the Hon. Daniel E. Sickles for Shooting Philip Barton Key, Esq. (New York, 1859), 31.

4

G.W.D. Andrews to Sickles, August 13, 1858, in Daniel E. Sickles Papers, New-York Historical Society; Henrik Hartog, “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and ‘the Unwritten Law’

in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 84 (June 1997): 70-71; 5

W.A. Swanberg, Sickles the Incredible (New York, 1956), 57.

6

Meade to Margaretta Meade, May 5, 1862, in Life and Letters, 1:263; Meade to ‘Dear Doct,’ August 5, 1861, to Joshua Barney, September 7, 1861, to Margaretta Meade, November 24, 1861, to John Sergeant Meade, Match 29, 1862, and to Margaretta Meade, January 26, 1863, in George G. Meade Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

7

Sickles, “Further Recollections of Gettysburg,” North American Review 152 (March 1891): 259; “Orders” and “Circular,” June 30, 1863, in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records 129 vols. (Washington, 1880-1901), Series I, Vol. 27(pt 3): 416-417, 421, 422-423, 424, 425 (hereafter OR).

8

S.M. Weld, diary entry for July 2, 1863, in War Diary and Letters of Stephen Minot Weld, 1861-1865, ed. H.W. Montague (1912; reprint, Boston, 1979), } CONT. ON P. 100

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ENDNOTES } CONT. FROM P. 99 231-232; Henry Edwin Tremain, Two Days of War: A Gettysburg Narrative and Other Excursions (New York, 1905),14.

9

C.A. Stevens, Berdan’s United States Sharpshooters in the Army of the Potomac, 1861-1865 (St. Paul, MN, 1892), 302, 303, 304-305, 308, 317; Elijah Walker to J.B. Bachelder, January 5, 1885, in The Bachelder Papers: Gettysburg in Their Own Words, eds. D. & A. Ladd (Dayton, 1994), 2:1093-1094; Thomas Rafferty, “Gettysburg—The Third Corps’ Great Battle on July 2,” National Tribune, February 2, 1888, and “Gettysburg,” November 7, 1883, in Personal Recollections of the War of the Rebellion: Addresses Delivered Before the New York Commandery of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 1883-1891, eds. J.G. Wilson & T.M. Coan (New York, 1891), 8-9.

10 “Testimony of Major General Daniel E. Sickles,” February 26, 1864, in Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, at the Second Session, Thirty-Eighth Congress (Washington, 1865), 4:297-298 (hereafter RJCCW); Richard Meade Bache, The Life of George Gordon Meade, Commander of the Army of the Potomac (Philadelphia, 1897), 320, 323.

11 Sickles, “The Meade-Sickles Controversy,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War 4 vols. (New York, 18871888), 3:416; Tremain, Two Days of War, 55; HISTORICUS, “Battle of Gettysburg—Important Communication from an Eye-Witness,” in OR, Series I, Vol. 27(pt 1):130; Tremain to Sickles, June 28, 1880, in Bachelder Papers, 1:670, 672-673; Meade, Life and Letters of George G. Meade, 2:70; “Testimony of Major General Daniel Sickles,” February 26, 1864, and “Testimony of Major General George G. Meade,” March 5, 1864, in RJCCW, 4:299, 331-332.

12 John Watts DePeyster, “The Third Corps at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863,” in Daniel E. Sickles Papers, New-York Historical Society; Richard A. Sauers, A Caspian Sea of Ink: The Meade-Sickles Controversy (Baltimore, 1989), 147; “Testimony of General Henry J. Hunt,” April 4, 1864, in RJCCW, 4:449, 450; Hessler, Sickles at Gettysburg, 116-117; Hunt, “The Second Day at Gettysburg,” in Battles & Leaders, 3:301.

13 “Testimony of Major General Daniel Sickles,” February 26, 1864, and “Testimony of Major General Andrew A. Humphreys,” March 21, 1864, in RJCCW, 4:298, 390-391; Rafferty, “Gettysburg—The Third Corps’ Great Battle on July 2,” National Tribune, February 2, 1888; Frank Rauscher, Music on the March, 1862-’65, With the Army of the Potomac, 114th Regt. P.V., Collis’ Zouaves (Philadelphia, 1892), 90-91.

14 “Testimony of Major General W.S. Han-

cock,” March 22, 1864, and “Testimony of General John Gibbon,” April 1, 1864, in RJCCW, 4:405-406, 440; Josiah Favill, diary entry for July 2, 1863, in The Diary of a Young Officer Serving with the Armies of the United States during the War of the Rebellion (Chicago, 1909), 245; “Statement of Lt. William P. Wilson,” in Bachelder Papers, 2:1194.

15 Robert K. Beecham, Gettysburg, the Pivotal Battle of the Civil War (Chicago, 1911), 162; Tremain, Two Days of War, 55-56, 61-62; “Testimony of Major General Daniel Sickles,” February 26, 1864, and “Testimony of General Henry J. Hunt,” April 4, 1864, in RJCCW, 4:298-299, 450; Frank E. Moran to Sickles, January 24, 1882, in Bachelder Papers, 2:772.

16 “The Battle of Gettysburg,” in OR, Series I, Vol. 27(pt 1):131-132; Meade, Life and Letters of George G. Meade, 2:78-79; Isaac Rusling Pennypacker, General Meade (New York, 1901),167-168; Tremain, Two Days of War, 63; Tremain to Sickles, June 28, 1880, in Bachelder Papers, 1:671-672; “Testimony of Major General George G. Meade,” March 5, 1864, and “Testimony of Major General David Birney,” March 7, 1864, in RJCCW, 4:332, 366.

17 John Bigelow to J.B. Bachelder and George Randolph to Bachelder, March 1866, in Bachelder Papers, 1:171-172, 239-240; “Sickles Recalls Fighting Battle of Gettysburg,” New York Evening Mail, December 2, 1909; Hessler, Sickles at Gettysburg, 204205.

18 W.H. Bullard to Sickles, September 13, 1897, in Daniel E. Sickles Papers, New-York Historical Society; “Affairs at Gettysburgh,” New York Times, July 18, 1863; Alexander Webb interview with Alexander Kelley, October 7, 1904, in William B. Styple, ed., Generals in Bronze: Interviewing the Commanders of the Civil War (Kearney, NJ, 2005), 152-153.

19 John Watts de Peyster, “An Ideal Soldier,” National Tribune, July 19, 1889.

20 Slocum to L.H. Morgan, January 2, 1864, in Life and Services of Major-General Henry Warner Slocum, 134-136; Crawford to Sickles, September 7, 1886, in Daniel E. Sickles Papers, New-York Historical Society.

21 “Testimony of Major General Daniel Sickles,” February 26, 1864, in RJCCW, 4:301; “The Battle of Gettysburg—Important Communication from an Eye Witness,” New York Herald, March 12, 1864; Meade to Halleck, March 15, 1864, in OR, Series I, Vol. 27(pt 1):128; Sauers, A Caspian Sea of Ink, 49-58.

22 “Crowds Bare Heads at Sickles Funeral,” New York Times, May 9, 1914.

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THE LONG ROLL OF FIRE CONTINUED FROM P. 77

THE U.S. ARMY HERITAGE AND EDUCATION CENTER

of human flesh.

Lieutenant Sumner Paine raced up to the front, seemingly on fire in the excitement of the moment. With the battle swirling 15 yards ahead, the 18-year-old officer turned to a comrade and yelled, “Isn’t this glorious?” Almost immediately, a piece of shrapnel crushed his ankle and sent him sprawling, but from one knee he steadied himself and waved the boys forward. Two bullets then creased his chest, killing him.³⁶ Among the smokeshrouded branches and leaves, Union weight finally began to tell. The Rebels started to fall back, first through the trees, then up against the low stone wall they had captured 15 minutes before. Abbott admired their courage but grimly watched as his men shot the deadenders down. Soon, most of the Rebels clambered over the wall and started the long march back across the valley.

Those who stayed surrendered.³⁷

would have shocked the sensibilities of many, but for the 20th Massachusetts, it was a simple matter of duty.³⁸ After all, battle was in their blood.

EPILOGUE Late in the morning on May 6, 1864, the 20th Massachusetts again was swept up in the inferno of battle, this time in the Wilderness west of Chancellorsville, Virginia. Caught in a terrible crossfire, George Macy—who had returned from his Gettysburg wounds to lead the regiment— went down with a shattered knee. Moments later, Henry Abbott— who had commanded the 20th in Macy’s absence— took a slug in his abdomen. Macy would survive and eventually rise to provost marshal of the Army of the Potomac, but Henry Abbott died that afternoon.

Lieutenant Oliver Wendell Sumner Paine Holmes Jr. had taken a staff position with the VI Corps and was near the front when he heard of Abbott’s death. Two months later he left the army for good, tired of the war he once embraced. He would become a successful Boston lawyer, then a justice of the United States Supreme Court, but the 20th Massachusetts and HENRY ABBOTT GATHERED what was his friend Henry Abbott were never left of his regiment. He counted 100 ef- far from his mind. He published a fectives. Only he and two other officers poem about Abbott in October 1864, remained standing. and on Memorial Day 20 years later, With the crisis over, the men of the he again recalled his comrades with 20th moved back to their original posi- words that have taken on a life of their tion. The next day, July 4, the entire own: “The Generation that carried army marked the birth of the country, on the war has been set apart by its a celebration made even more elecexperience. Through our great good tric by the victory at Gettysburg and fortune, in our youth our hearts were the news of the Confederate surrentouched with fire.”³⁹ der of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Bay Staters also learned that Paul Revere PATRICK BRENNAN, a member of the Monihad died of his horrid wound. tor’s editorial advisory board, is the auEventually Abbott calculated that thor of Secessionville: Assault on Charleston (1996). A music producer based in in the two days at Gettysburg, 31 of his men had been killed and 93 wound- Chicago, he has co-written two major television works, Fields of Fire: The Civil ed. Another three had gone missing.

War in 3D for Discovery/SONY (2011) and Around 90 of the casualties occurred Inside World War II for National Geoin or near the copse of trees, a fight graphic (2012), as well as the music for over 250 broadcast documentaries. that lasted 15 minutes. Such numbers

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS CONTINUED FROM P. 85

enemy’s cannon-balls—think then, if you please, how these words fell on my ears.” For this army officer, Lincoln’s address brought forth a moment of pure epiphany: “If at that moment the Supreme Being had appeared to me with an offer to undo my past life, give back to me a sound body free from the remembrance even of sufferings past and those that must necessarily embitter all the years to come, I should have indignantly spurned the offer, such was the effect upon me of this immortal dedication.”²² When the president told the crowd that the world could never forget what the soldiers of the North had accomplished at Gettysburg, an unidentified army captain sobbed openly and then, according to a reporter, “lifted his eyes to heaven and in low and solemn tones exclaimed ‘God Almighty, bless Abraham Lincoln.’”

Isaac Arnold—who was not there but gained his information from Governor William Dennison of Ohio— said that “before the first sentence was completed, a thrill of feeling, like an electric shock, pervaded the crowd.”²³ Others who were not there that day agreed nonetheless that Lincoln’s words were positively thrilling. As George William Curtis, editor of Harper’s Weekly, put it, “The few words of the President were from the heart to the heart. They cannot be read, even, without kindling emotion.”

The emotional appeal was also felt by an editorial writer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, who noted: “The President’s brief speech of dedication is most happily expressed.

It is warm, earnest, unaffected, and touching. Thousands who would not read the long, elaborate oration of Mr. Everett will read the President’s few words, and not many will do it without a moistening of the eye and a swelling of the heart.”²⁴ Trying to weigh the contradictory evidence surrounding the Gettysburg Address is exasperat } CONT. ON P. 102

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ing. One cannot argue, for instance, that the same people who thought the speech a failure also recorded that there was no applause, or that those who said they heard cheers were the ones who called it a success. In fact, the available documentation shows no such correlation, despite the fact that one recent historian has asserted that “when hostile reports carried the

Four men who heard Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address gather at Soldiers’ National Cemetery on the 50th anniversary of the event in 1913. Philip H. Bikle, second from right, remembered “surprise that his speech was so short.”

speech they often included applause and some papers … in addition to noting ‘applause’ and ‘immense applause,’ mentioned the speech being interrupted with shouts of ‘Good, good.’”²⁵ Apart from newspapers (and not just hostile ones), civilian eyewitnesses also commented on the crowd’s reaction to the address. “Several times,” wrote a crowd member, “the silence was broken by spontaneous applause, and the wonderful fitness and beauty of the language were certainly appreciated by many present.”²⁶ Nor can one simply dismiss the reports of applause, cheers, or outright silence. The witnesses whose accounts

regarded as an intimate, a congenial acquaintance, or even just a plain admirer, a phenomenon that renowned Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald so aptly phrased “getting right with Lincoln.”²⁷ As a result, when it comes to the Gettysburg Address, it’s nearly impossible to know whom to trust among the plentiful array of eyewitnesses.

In the end, we are brought full circle. There is no feasible way to describe with certainty the audience’s reaction to the Gettysburg Address, just as there are many other unresolved mysteries and contradictions about the speech. The evidence, con-

flicting and incongruous, incomplete and meager, simply does not tell us, cannot tell us, what we want to know or what historians—a disagreeable lot, if ever there was one, especially when it comes to inconclusive evidence—believe they need to know about Lincoln’s most famous speech. All we can conclude, unsatisfactory as it may be, is that those who heard the address in person reacted emotionally but differently, depending on where they stood in the mass of thousands and what they could honestly remember after standing with Lincoln on that hallowed ground.

Yet we can, despite these barriers, still reach a definitive conclusion about the Gettysburg Address. It was a success; it remains a success. No matter what the listeners at the cemetery’s dedication heard or thought they heard, if they applauded or didn’t applaud, despite what they missed or misconstrued, the nation as a whole has taken Lincoln’s speech into its heart, cherishing its message and its eloquence. His words live in a place of national affection and appreciation, where they will remain for all time. Perhaps we can reconcile ourselves to the fact that the soldiers in the audience, many of whom suffered from wounds and sickness earned in the Union army, appreciated Lincoln’s words with more emotion than the civilians in the crowd, whether they applauded the president’s performance or not. Lincoln’s “simple words,” wrote J. Howard Wert, a Gettysburg resident, in 1909, “spoke to their very souls.” Herman H. Hahn, another soldier in attendance at the dedication, stated bluntly that he believed the Gettysburg Address “was the greatest speech ever made.”²⁸ Even if that blunt assessment goes too far, we may at the very least acknowledge that Hahn’s emotional response to Lincoln’s speech, given his military service to the Union, is something we can completely understand.

GLENN W. LAFANTASIE,

a frequent contributor to the Monitor, is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History and the director of the Institute for Civil War Studies at Western Kentucky University.

ADAMS COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY, GETTYBURG, PA

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

contradict others were not prevaricating. Even Lamon’s untrustworthy memories must be accepted for what they are—another eyewitness report that does not fit snugly with any other.

If historians believe, as they seem to, that Lamon lied, they have forgotten that other testimony about the day is riddled with as many statements of unreliability and even incredibility as Lamon’s own. The passage of almost 150 years does not help. Interwoven into so many of the accounts of the speech are all the encumbrances of the 16th president’s martyrdom and the desire of his contemporaries to be

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ENDNOTES 1

“Lincoln’s Great Speech,” National Tribune, April 15, 1926.

2 William E. Barton, The Life of Abraham Lincoln 2 vols. (Indianapolis, 1925), 2:218.

3 Quoted in Frank L. Klement, “Ward H. Lamon and the Dedication of the Soldiers’ Cemetery at Gettysburg,” Civil War History 31 (December 1985): 299.

4 Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., A New Birth of Freedom: Lincoln at Gettysburg (Boston, 1983), 109; Louis A. Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Declaration: “A New Birth of Freedom” (Fort Wayne, Ind., 1964), 66–67.

5 Kunhardt, New Birth, 110.

6 Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg, 66–67; William E. Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg (Indianapolis, 1930), 60–65.

7 Kunhardt, New Birth, 198–99; Klement, “Ward H. Lamon,” 300.

8 Statement of Philip H. Bikle, in Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 180. On the weather conditions that day, see also Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg, 75–76.

9 Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 74–76, 182.

10 Ibid., 76; Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years 4 vols. (New York, 1939), 2:467, 470; Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg, 88–89.

11 Kunhardt, New Birth, 198–203; Warren, Lincoln’s Gettysburg, 110.

12 Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1997), 113.

13 Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 170, 191; Klement, “Ward H. Lamon,” 305; Kunhardt, New Birth, 215.

14 Statement of Joseph A. Gouldon, in Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 188.

15 “Heard Lincoln Make Speech at Gettysburg,” Chicago Daily Journal, November 19, 1913; J.F.F., “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” Springfield [Mass.]

Republican, December 22, 1879.

16 Statement of Ward Hill Lamon, in Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 201.

17 On Lamon’s lack of credibility, see Frank L. Klement, “Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, and Two Myths,” Blue and Gray Magazine 2 (OctoberNovember 1984): 7–11.

18 Statement of Henry E. Jacobs, in Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 183.

19 Statement of Philip H. Bikle, in ibid., 179; “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” Springfield [Mass.] Republican, July 20, 1887.

20 Statement of Cornelius Cole, in Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 163.

21 Statement of Horatio King, in ibid., 167; “Her Memories of War Days,” New York Evening Post, February 13, 1909.

22 Statement of A. H. Nickerson, in Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 186.

23 Statement of William Dennison, in ibid., 165; Klement, “Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, and Two Myths,” 11.

INTRODUCING

BEHIND THE LINES A N E W V I D E O I N T E R V I E W S E R I E S F E AT U R I N G C O N V E R SAT I O N S W I T H P R O M I N E N T M E M B E R S O F T H E A M E R I CA N C I V I L WA R C O M M U N I T Y

24 Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 119.

25 Gabor S. Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows (New York, 2006), 329.

26 “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” St. Johnsbury Caledonian, July 28, 1887.

27 David Herbert Donald, “Getting Right with Lincoln,” in Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (1956; 3rd ed., New York, 1989), 3-14.

28 J. Howard Wert, “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” Harrisburg Patriot, February 13, 1909; “Brainerd Man Heard Gettysburg Address,” Duluth News-Tribune, June 18, 1915.

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Parting Shot

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG ended early for Captain Joseph B. Fitch, who was wounded in the thigh and taken prisoner on July 2, 1863, while he and his comrades in the 20th Maine Infantry fought off repeated Confederate attacks on Little Round Top. Fitch faced a precarious future—an extended stay in a Confederate prison camp while nursing a serious injury—until his fate took a turn for the better the following day with Robert E. Lee’s decision to withdraw his army after the repulse of Pickett’s Charge. The captain was granted a battlefield parole (pictured here), which allowed him to return to the safety of Union lines but not to “do any military duty whatever” until formally exchanged. Fitch’s wound clearly played a role in the decision, as evidenced by the scribbled note from the authorizing Confederate officer.

“This Parole is extended to the wounded in consideration of humanity to save a painful and tedious march to the rear,” he wrote.

Fitch would recover and rejoin the 20th Maine, serving until war’s end.

He returned home with a scar on his leg, the satisfaction of preserving the Union, and one heck of a good Gettysburg souvenir.

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A Rare Reprieve

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