GettysBlog

In the News

I wanted to share two recent news items with our Lincoln at Gettysburg readers.

Did you hear that President Bush visited Gettysburg last week? He and a small entourage that included former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former White House political adviser Karl Rove, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, and Karen Hughes, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs for the State Department were given a tour of the battlefield by Gabor Boritt, author of The Gettysburg Gospel and director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Their tour began at the Virginia Memorial, one of over 1,300 monuments at the Gettysburg National Military Park, and included a visit to the park's new Museum and Visitor Center.

Here in Ithaca, Cornell Professor Ross Brann, posted some comments about the New Student Reading Project in his Cornell Daily Sun blog, which were then reprinted in the Chronicle Online. He asks us: What are we doing here at Cornell? I don't believe that is a rhetorical question. Would any of you like to comment on his observations?

And there you have it. Presidents visiting battlefields. Professors setting challenges for their students. All of us settling into our fall semester schedules and routines.

[Image of the Virginia Memorial at Gettysburg is from adamr.stone's flickr site.]

What is a good book?

Each of us will answer differently, but for me a good book is one that leads me to another book. Or better yet, other books: on the same topics, by the same author, or even something completely different.

Our reading of Lincoln at Gettysburg has left me curious to learn more about Lincoln, his speeches, the Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War, etc. And so began my serendipitous summer reading saga.

As I was reading our book earlier this year, I began to search for some book reviews about it, and then looked up some Lincoln articles by Garry Wills. These led me to the texts of other Lincoln speeches, especially his Cooper Union speech and his Second Inaugural. (Treat yourself to more of Lincoln's writing. I think you will find yourself in awe of our most literate president.)

Then I picked up the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels. (Some fiction for Wendy!) You will not find a more compelling historical novel. But I also wanted to know more about the details of the battle, so I read James McPherson's Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg,which left me wanting to return to Gettysburg and follow his tour word-by-word and step-by-step.

Presently I am reading Gabor Boritt's The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows. If by chance you want to learn even more about the Gettysburg Address--perhaps everything there is to learn about it--then this elaborately detailed study of the events surrounding Lincoln's speech is the book for you. For instance, in our book we are told that Lincoln wisely traveled by train to Gettysburg a day earlier than originally planned. Boritt puts us on that train and gives us details about this trip:  a description of the special, elegant train cars supplied by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, a listing of the important politicians and journalists on board, and the politics of this trip. Was this speech the first campaign event in Lincoln's run for re-election? I found it interesting to note that Edward Everett's daughter, Charlotte Wise, was likely the only woman on this train and that the President's valet, William H. Johnson, may have been the only African American traveling in this entourage.

And then there is the Lincoln poetry. Does anyone read poetry anymore? I'm not sure I will make it all the way through Stephen Vincent Benet's epic poem of the Civil War, John Brown's Body (another Pulitzer Prize winning work), but I will certainly be rereading Walt Whitman's homage to Lincoln: "Oh Captain, My Captain."

Will there be time to indulge in Doris Kearns Goodwin's mammoth group biography of Lincoln and his Cabinet members, A Team of Rivals?

The Saddest Day of My Life

As we look back through time and try to imagine Gettysburg on the morning of July 3, 1863, we are confronted by several ironies of fate. General Robert E. Lee and his Army of North Virginia were one attack away from victory over the Union's Army of the Potomac and maybe of winning the entire war that day. Could it be possible that the Confederacy would win its independence as the anniversary of our nation's birth was to be celebrated?

That attack would be a charge across an open field directed at the center of the Union's forces. Pickett's Charge. General James Longstreet was Lee's senior corps commander. He would later recall: "My heart was heavy. I could see the desperate and hopeless nature of the charge and the cruel slaughter it would cause. That day in Gettysburg was the saddest of my life."

General George Meade, the commander of the Union forces, would report back to Lincoln that evening:

"The enemy opened at 1 p. m. from about 150 guns, concentrated upon my left and center, continuing without intermission for about three hours, at the expiration of which time he assaulted my left center twice, being upon both occasions handsomely repulsed, with
severe loss to him...The enemy left many dead upon the field and a large number of wounded in our hands...My cavalry have been engaged all day on both flanks of the enemy, harassing and vigorously attacking him with great success...The army is in fine spirits."

The next day--July 4th--Lincoln and the Union would celebrate the victory at Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicksburg to General Ulysses S. Grant. It was the beginning of the end of the war. The United States would remain united states.

However there were many dead left upon that field in Gettysburg. Which brings us to the prologue of our book. Next week we will begin to read and think about the words that remade America.

For those of you wanting to learn more about Pickett's Charge, I highly recommend viewing the two segments devoted to this topic from Ken Burn's film, The Civil War, that can be found on YouTube. Part One and Part Two.

[The Gettysburg monument image is by Alan Cordova and can be found on his Flickr site.]

"In great deeds, something abides."

These are the words of Joshua Chamberlain, the Union hero who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for the defense of Little Round Top on the second day of fighting at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. His story is featured in the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara and in the film Gettysburg that was based on this book.

It is fitting that we think of him on this anniversary of his deeds. After Gettysburg he went on to become one of the war's most extraordinary soldiers and later the Governor of Maine. But I would like to focus on his other profession today. Prior to the war he had been a professor of Rhetoric at Bowdoin College. (He could read in seven foreign languages: Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac.) After the war he returned to Bowdoin to teach and to become its president.

In his excellent book, Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg, James McPherson tells of Chamberlain's return to Gettysburg in 1886 to dedicate a monument for his Twentieth Maine regiment. Let us read more of Chamberlain's speech and his rhetoric:

"In great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate the 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...." 

Done for us.

[Image: Little Round Top, 1863. It is from the Library of Congress Selected Civil War Photographs collection.]

A Great Battle-field of that War

Before there was the Gettysburg Address, there was the Battle of Gettysburg, the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere. The fighting took place in the sweltering heat of the first three days of July in 1863 at a location where neither army intended to fight. Starting as a skirmish between Confederate soldiers said to be looking for a supply of shoes in Gettysburg and a Union cavalry unit scouting ahead of the main forces, the fighting quickly escalated into a full-scale battle.

Paradoxically the Confederates, having invaded Pennsylvania, approached the town from the north, while the Union troops, trying to remain between the invaders and Washington, came in from the south. History tells us that this was the turning point of the Civil War. Though the conflict continued for two more years, the South never fully recovered from the losses they suffered here.

There are a great many books and not a few web sites devoted to Gettysburg. See the Library of Congress Today in History site to read about the events of July 1. For more details about the first day of fighting, go to Gettysburg: Bloody Crossroad. Note their Maps in Motion feature. And for those of you wanting even more information about this conflict, take the Gettysburg National Military Park Virtual Tour. The United States Army has an interesting multimedia site devoted to The Battle of Gettysburg and a succinct overview of each day of the battle can be found at MilitaryHistoryOnline.com.

What brought those 165,000 soldiers to Gettysburg?  Approximately 50,000 of them were killed or wounded or reported missing after this battle. What was accomplished by this carnage? Lincoln's words and Mr. Wills's analysis of them will provide us with some answers.