GettysBlog

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Maps

In Lincoln at Gettysburg  Garry Wills gives us a fascinating analysis of the political and cultural background of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the events preceding it. With Mapping the Paths to the Address we're attempting to put the ideas and events discussed in Lincoln at Gettysburg in a geographic context. Wills describes how Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to deliver the Address and the care with which it was composed.  Wills reviews the national events that brought Lincoln to the dedication of the Memorial Cemetery, the dedication which provided the occasion for the address.  Wills's analysis includes an overview of the bitter sectionalism that led up to the war and the oratory used to defend each side.

Since Wills spends less time on the progress of the war itself, including the battle,  we have provided maps that can help the reader of Lincoln at Gettysburg understand the historical moment in the course of the war and the underlying geography of both the war and the battle. One of the maps, for example, is a watercolor showing the topography of the battlefield at the time of the battle without reference to the military situation. This is one of an interesting series of battlefield maps produced by an (almost) local cartographer, Earl McElfresh of Olean, NY. ( http://www.mcelfreshmap.com/ ) Other maps show us the military situation and the battle itself.

Wills draws strong parallels between Lincoln's Address and other funeral oratories. He is particularly interested in the influence of Pericles' Funeral Oration as reported in Thycidide History. Even rather abstract notions such as classical Greek rhetoric and the epitaphios developed in a real place: the Athens of 430 BC, and Athens can be located and reconstructed on a map in a way that adds to our understanding of the Funeral Oration.

We have also chosen maps which tell us something about the country in the years preceding the Civil War--the political trauma already in evidence 10 years earlier with the Missouri Compromise, and a map using the contemporary 1860 Census to provide a statistical and geographical analysis of slavery and another map showing the routes of the Underground Railway.

One of the maps has a local interest. We display several maps showing the the infrastructure of the nation on the verge of the war. Of particular importance is the uneven development of the railroad systems in the North and South. Paralleling that uneven development is the growth of the telegraph system. In Ezra Cornell's papers we found a unique undated map of the telegraph system in the United States, but it is clearly from sometime in the 1850's, at the period when Cornell was forming the Western Union Telegraph Company.

We've also mounted the plans of several rural garden cemeteries including the plans for the Gettysburg Cemetery, and a modern map of the park and its monuments.

Wills weaves together many strands of cultural material to give us a new understanding and appreciation of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We hope this map exhibit will help you put some of those materials into a geographic context and enhance your engagement with Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Mapping the Paths to the Address is mounted on the back wall of the Media Center. This is not an ideal venue, but mounting it there allowed us to keep Cartobibulosity up in the map display cases for some wine events scheduled for later in the Fall. We hope you'll still be able to enjoy it. Of course, we'd appreciate any feedback at all about either exhibit. We are working on putting the exhibit online so that everyone has a chance to see it.

Bob Kibbee, Maps and Geospacial Information Collection

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.

Lincoln and Gettysburg Today

Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address seven score and five years ago, that is 145 years ago. Garry Wills wrote this book about Abraham Lincoln in 1992 or about the time that our incoming Class of 2012 Cornellians were only two years old. This is all history. This is the past.

But Lincoln and Gettysburg are in our current headlines, news, and media. Appearing on magazine racks this last week of June are copies of a Special Edition of the magazine U.S. News & World Reports on the Secrets of the Civil War. A young, clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln is on the cover. Inside you will find articles about "The Real Lincoln" including an excerpt from Gabor Boritt's 2006 book, The Gettysburg Gospel, a fascinating book about the Gettysburg Address that I will discuss in a later posting.

Given that we have another senator from Illinois presently running for the Presidency of the United States, there have been numerous Lincoln references made about Barrack Obama. See today's (June 26, 2008) Doonesbury cartoon strip for some up to the minute political commentary. There will be more to say about Mr. Obama later this summer as well.

And back on April 24th, the new Gettysburg Museum and Visitor's Center opened at the Gettysburg National Military Park. I was there two weeks ago and wished that my schedule had allowed me to spend more time there. I highly recommend visiting the museum, the battlefield, and the cemetery. (By the way Gettysburg is about a 4 hour drive from Ithaca for those of you wanting to make this field trip.)

And Lincoln is with us here at Cornell. This image is of a marble bust by the American artist, Vinnie Ream Hoxie. This sculpture resides in the Dean Reading Room of Uris Library here on campus.

As the American novelist, William Faulkner, has written, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."