At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?… Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined… could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.… If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, LYCEUM ADDRESS (1838)
I think of them now, running toward me in their baggy wool blues, fingers gripping long rifles, shouting maybe, gritting teeth. I bet they trip, some, the sloping ground uneven, stone-poked, the smoke swirling, blocking views. They don’t think of our home, of Minnesota, they don’t think of the future or lovers or even death. They are just running. Lead shocks and spins friends, the splat-thud of shot minie ball meeting flesh, and they stumble steps away, palms scraped, stained, breaking falls. But they keep on, all 260-some charging this way. And about here, near where I kneel, they meet the enemy—same language, same fears and loves, same country in the end—and in twenty minutes it’s over, the Union saved, more than 80 percent of the First Minnesota killed or wounded, spread across this ground that at dusk soaks in their blood.
Months later, close by, the president will acknowledge their sacrifice, what they have done—they and countless others—saying that it’s up to us to remember, that they have done their part, making this hallowed ground. And decades later, dusk again, I’m here alone with them. Lying in long summer grass, inhaling the smell of soil close, wondering if any that fell knew the same. The fight done, was it quiet like this? Were frogs singing just past spring, killdeer calling in what seems delight, swallows carving a darkening sky? Were fireflies and lightning bugs floating skyward by the dozens, then hundreds, as many as the dead and wounded that will lie in surrounding fields tonight?
Ask an American to name “hallowed ground,” and they will say “Gettysburg.” For us, the words are nearly synonymous. Here, in early July 1863, a battle raged that was the largest and bloodiest ever on United States soil. In three days of fighting at least eight thousand men died on this battlefield, and many more died soon afterward of their wounds. The fighting was incredibly intense, the battle considered the turning point of our Civil War. While others helped to shape the idea of this place—the president’s invitation to the event read “These Grounds will [be] Consecrated and set apart to this Sacred purpose”—it is Lincoln’s short speech we remember, and his argument that “In a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.” Some of those brave men came from my home state of Minnesota, and it is to their place on the battlefield that I have come. I want to know what, in the end, “hallowed” means.
To our modern ears, the word sounds like something from the nineteenth century, from fading photos in black and white. And at first look this hallowed ground does not seem much different than any other. There is no magic aura floating above the blades of grass, no special tinge of color to the soil. The small flowers are the small flowers I have seen elsewhere—buttercups, daisies—and the birds do not fly surrounded by a golden glow. That’s one of the things I notice immediately about hallowed ground—it wouldn’t feel hallowed if no one had told you it was. Or maybe I’m wrong.
There are so many famous scenes from this battle, and at Gettysburg, everything is about preserving those sites. In addition to simply protecting the grounds from development, the National Park Service is actively engaged in returning the grounds to what they looked like during the battle. In one location it might cut down mature trees to re-create a farmer’s field, and in another it might plant trees where they would have been. In both preserving and re-creating, it has plenty of challenges. During the battle there were thirty-eight fruit orchards, and today there is only one, the famous Peach Orchard, where heavy fighting raged. There is the odd modern spectacle, on this hallowed battlefield, of sharpshooters hired to cull a deer herd burgeoning far beyond its Civil War–era numbers. And there are the many dozens of monuments honoring the various states, most at places where units from that state had their moment of glory. A handful of these monuments draw bigger crowds than others—perhaps made famous in a movie or novel, or honoring soldiers from nearby states. For example, here in Pennsylvania the massive Pennsylvania monument is particularly popular. But next door, at the base of the monument honoring the soldiers who came from farthest away, I am alone.
This monument has a white base topped by the bronze figure of a Union soldier running with rifle and bayonet in the direction the First Minnesota made their charge. It was July 2, the second day of the battle, and just before dusk. The Minnesotans were guarding a battery of cannons when Alabamans began to advance. If the Confederates were able to break through the Union line here, it would split the Union army in two, and quite possibly turn the battle and thus the war.
The Union’s commanding officer in the area, Winfield Scott Hancock, rode to where the soldiers from Minnesota lay listening to the rebel minie balls “hissing over us, cutting the weeds and bushes, plumping into the ground and spatting against the stone,” and said, “My God, are these all the men we have here?” It was. No matter. Without hesitation he ordered the First Minnesota to charge Confederate forces four times their number. “Every man realized in an instant what that order meant—death or wounds to us all,” wrote one of the soldiers, “the sacrifice of the regiment to gain a few minutes’ time and save the position, and probably the battlefield.” And the next thing the Alabama regiments saw coming toward them were 262 Minnesotans, running forward, bayonets fixed.
It took the Union soldiers about ninety seconds to cover the three hundred yards between themselves and the Confederates, most of it a harvested wheatfield’s stubble. Ninety seconds of double-timing down the slight slope toward the trees and bushes where the soldiers from Alabama were shocked to see “screaming men charging out of dense smoke.” But not so shocked that they couldn’t unleash waves of rifle and cannon fire that tore through the Minnesota ranks. “Great heavens how fast our men fell,” wrote one soldier. “It seemed as if every step was over some fallen comrade. Yet no man wavers: every gap is closed-up.” The “double-quick” march with which the charge had begun quickly turned to as-fast-as-they-could-go, for it was the “only hope that any of us would pass through that storm of lead and strike the enemy.” Captain Muller was shot through the head and dropped dead. First Lieutenant DeGray fell with a four-inch rip in his skull from a bullet. Captain Perium had a minie ball “punch through the right side of his nose and exit behind his left ear.” The Minnesotans charged to within feet of the Alabamans, then let fly bullets of their own, and the two armies met in hand-to-hand combat in a dry ravine called Plum Run.
Renowned historian James McPherson tells me the noise is perhaps the hardest thing for a visitor to imagine. When he visits Plum Run, “What I imagine is chaos, confusion, yelling. It’s pretty hard to put yourself into the cacophony.” The noise, and the smoke. As the Minnesotans’ commanding officer William Colville wrote later, “My glance took in the slope on my left. I saw numbers of our men lying upon it as they had fallen. Then came a shock like a sledgehammer on my back bone between the shoulders. It turned me partly around and made me ‘see stars.’” He had been hit by a minie ball that nicked his spine and lodged under a shoulder blade. Putting his foot down to steady himself, he was promptly hit in the ankle with yet another ball, then pitched forward and hit the ground. Nearby, a shell burst above Private Isaac Taylor, taking off the back of his head and nearly slicing him in half.
At dusk, the fighting subsided. The Confederate commanders realized that their forward momentum had been stopped. When the Minnesotans rallied back around the unit’s colors, they found they had only twenty-five men. “Every man, without exception, had his clothing riddled—some of them all to rags,” wrote the regimental quartermaster. With both sides pulled back, hogs unpenned from nearby farms entered the battlefield, devouring some of the dead. In a letter home a soldier wrote, “The ground was strewed with dead and dying, whose groans and prayers and cries for help and water rent the air. The sun had gone down and in the darkness we hurried, stumbled over the field in search of our fallen companions.” Another soldier slept, he wrote, “with dead men and horses lying all around me.”
The casualty rate suffered by the First Minnesota that day—82 percent killed and wounded—was the highest of any unit in the Union army in any battle of the Civil War. But in general and for all, Gettysburg was a battle of carnage. McPherson reports that after the battle ended, “burial details hastily interred more than three thousand dead Union soldiers and many of the almost four thousand dead Confederates. Five thousand dead horses were doused with coal oil and burned.” In locations that saw particularly heavy fighting, such as the famous Wheatfield, soldiers reported so many dead and wounded that they could have walked over the battlefield without ever touching ground. One wrote,
Corpses strewed the ground at every step. Arms, legs, heads, and parts of dismembered bodies were scattered all about, and sticking among the rocks, and against the trunks of trees, hair, brains, entrails, and shreds of human flesh still hung, a disgusting, sickening, heartrending spectacle to our young minds. One man has as many as twenty canister or case shots through different parts of his body, though none through a vital organ, and he was still gasping and twitching with a slight motion of the muscles, and vibrations of the pulse, although utterly unconscious of approaching death.
“For months,” McPherson writes, “the stench of hospitals, and of corpses unburied or buried in shallow graves, hung over the town and countryside.”
Many of the most famous photographs from the Civil War are from Gettysburg, and of these most are of Confederate soldiers, their bodies bloated and faces contorted in death. As Drew Gilpin Faust has written in This Republic of Suffering, the sheer number of casualties overwhelmed the two armies’ burial capabilities. Because the Union controlled the battleground, its dead received better attention than those from the Confederate army, many of whom were simply dumped into mass graves “like dead chickens,” or left to rot. This is why most of the famous photographs are of dead Confederate soldiers showing the first stages of decay: rigor mortis, and bloat as microbes grow and form gases in the body (the next stages were yet to come: loss of mass due to insect eating and release of liquids, advanced decay where there is little left of the body, and finally skeletonization, where no flesh remains).
Isaac Taylor’s brother Henry found his sibling the next day, and with two comrades dug his grave: “We laid him down with all his clothes on, as he fell, and spread a shelter tent over him.” Battlefield conditions, as well as a lack of time and supplies, dictated shortcuts for the care of the bodies, even for the best of friends or brothers. Grave markers were made from scrap wood and marked with pencil. Not surprisingly, twenty-two bodies now lie in the Minnesota plot of the Gettysburg National Cemetery with nothing but “Unknown. Regt. 1” on their gravestones.
It was nearly eight years before organizations from the former Confederate states returned to disinter their dead, and by then identification was difficult and finding all bodies impossible. As recently as 1997 a skeleton—most likely of a Confederate soldier—emerged from the soil. “I’m sure he’s not the only one,” McPherson tells me. “They obviously didn’t find everybody, and I’m sure there are a lot more. Which makes the whole battlefield something of a cemetery.”
Remarkably, despite the momentous events that took place on these grounds, it took an 1896 Supreme Court decision to guarantee the battlefield’s protection. In the case, the government argued, “the ground whereon great conflicts have taken place, especially those where great interests or principles were at stake, becomes at once of so much public interest that its preservation is essentially a matter of public concern.” The court agreed, and declared that protecting the field of battle was “so closely connected with the welfare of the republic itself as to be within the powers granted Congress by the Constitution for the purpose of protecting and preserving the whole country.”
At 6:45 on a summer’s evening, I start down the slope where the First Minnesota charged. Rather than a field of harvested wheat, I walk over clover-crowded ankle-high grass. Small yellow butterflies. Killdeer, swallows. The highway in the distance steadily hums with cars. Mountains on the horizon, open fields ahead and behind, barns in the distance. If I were a Minnesota soldier I’d be double-timing it downhill toward the trees. I’d be jogging toward the ground where I might die. This evening, I’m alone. I wonder if there’s anything left of the Minnesota out here, in the ground. My friend Laura, who grew up in northwest Virginia, says when she buried her beloved dog in her childhood backyard she found a Confederate belt buckle in the dirt.
When I reach the ravine, where the worst fighting took place, the hand-to-hand, the bayonet-stuck bellies and the rifle-crushed skulls, I step on an exposed rock and think, This was here. I am on the same ground where those soldiers from Minnesota fought and fell, at the same time of day. I drop to my knees in thigh-high grass, then fall forward to rest my face against the ground. The smell of grass, clear beads of water on long green leaves, the sight of a ladybug’s burnt orange. When I rise, the impression of my body, my knees, stays. Ground soft from rain, wind in my hair. I’m walking where they did. Impossible to know exactly what happened where on this blood-soaked ground. Bumpy, grassy ground, brushing bare calves. Decaying logs, clovers, beds of tan-brown fallen grass. Buttercups, daisies, brown-eyed Susans. The stars of flowers, the stars above.
I wonder, How different is this Gettysburg ground from what it was? How has this ground changed over the years?
John Commito came to Gettysburg College in 1993, bringing a thick Boston accent and an expertise in ecology. Every September since, he has started his Principles of Ecology course on the battlefield, and one big theme is the changing ground. “That’s a very important lesson for students to learn. Because of human factors but also because of nature running its course through time, the way it looks today is not only different from the way it looked in the eighteen sixties, it’s different from the way it looked ten years ago. It is a living landscape. It’s not paved concrete.”
That said, when I ask Commito how similar the actual ground of the battlefield today is to what it was during the battle, he tells me that though the specific soil may have changed, the level of soil is generally unchanged. And that the larger the item—think of a gradient from soil to pebbles to cobbles to boulders—the more likely it is to remain in place. “So,” he says, “certainly there are witness stones on the battlefield—a stone that was present during the battle—even though the small soil particles may have been eroded away and replaced by new soil particles.”
I ask whether for him, knowing it’s the same ground makes walking on the battlefield feel different than walking elsewhere. “For me it definitely does, and for the students too. One of our study sites used to be by the original line of Pickett’s Charge. Everyone knows about Pickett’s Charge, and everyone knows about the slaughter that took place. And that’s right where we get out, right by the Virginia monument. Then we walk into the woods and we do our work. That definitely freaks out some kids.”
And does the idea of “hallowed ground” have anything to do with the actual ground, or is it just what happened there? “Well, a lot of people died there,” Commito says. He tells me that he teaches a course in which he takes the class to a graveyard, and that he will often have students start to cry, “usually when they see a little baby’s tombstone.” And that when he takes them out on the battlefield and they know that thousands of people were killed and wounded right where they’re standing, they feel close to what they felt in the cemetery. But he says that students also feel this way in the forest, when “they see the big giant dead trees, and it impresses them when they see a tree that is dying or has died, and is lying down on the ground, and it’s going to enrich the soil with organic material and nitrogen and phosphorus. And gee, that thing was around for a hundred and fifty years, and then it fell to the ground—nothing is permanent. Maybe they get some of the same feeling when they know that all of these people who were their age were killed right there where we are going to be collecting data—literally under our feet.”
A colleague of Commito’s at Gettysburg College, Kent Gramm is the author of Gettysburg: This Hallowed Ground and November: Lincoln’s Elegy at Gettysburg, a book that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. When I ask him about hallowed ground, Gramm says that over the years he has talked to many visitors on the battlefield who come with a sense of pilgrimage.
What they’re looking for, he says is “not necessarily something in a patriotic sense,” but something larger, something like “the meaning of life, or the presence of the divine.” And, he says, he thinks people have been drawn to the location for centuries. As he explains, Gettysburg was sacred to Native Americans long before the battle, and they used it as a meeting place because of the strange geological formations on the southern end of the field. “Or maybe,” he says, “it’s because a place of great stress and impact still retains something, as Joshua Chamberlain said.”
It turns out that Chamberlain returned many times to the scene of the Twentieth Maine’s battle on Little Round Top, and during one such visit said,
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… 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.
“You could believe that or not, I suppose,” Gramm says. “A lot of people go to Gettysburg and find that there’s just something there that gets you. It’s moving. But what if they didn’t know? Is it something we bring? Is it something in our minds?”
I think so. It’s how we think of certain grounds that dictates how we use them. Why do we consider certain ground sacred or hallowed, for example, and not other ground? Why do we keep from paving or developing some areas but with others plow ahead?
Gramm believes it’s because “we have lost a sense of the sacredness of human life. When we visit a place like Gettysburg, we’re really confronted with the sacredness of human life when we see how fragile it is. It reminds us because it’s so compressed a place where so many gave their lives. But in a way, we should have this consciousness everywhere. When we desecrate the earth, and desecrate our own place of living—and where others have lived, and worked, and struggled, and played, and died—I think that shows a nonvaluing of human life that a battlefield briefly reminds us of.”
Could the counterargument be, Well, that’s just progress? I ask.
“Yes, progress. It’s almost like doublespeak, isn’t it? It may be progress for some people who get what they want, while the rest of us have something destroyed.”
For Gramm, there’s definitely a presence on Gettysburg’s hallowed ground. “What I feel,” he says, “is not necessarily war related. I feel a divine presence somehow. I don’t know whether to explain it because of the violence and death, and the sacrifice, and the nobility and courage, or because of any spiritual presence that’s somehow related to that. I don’t know why or how it would be related to that.”
He ponders his own question, and then comes back to Lincoln. Maybe it’s the idea that many people were there for a sense of something beyond, and higher than, themselves, he says. And in that case, it can apply to Southerners as well. “Even though it was not the cause that Lincoln is saying was sacred,” he reflects, “perhaps the sacrifice for something more than oneself—whether mistakenly or not—carries with it some kind of holiness. If you are willing to fight and sacrifice for others, that means you’re fighting for something higher, and at Gettysburg I think that higher purpose connects with equality. All the major religions speak of transcending that illusory self that we are so preoccupied with and that keeps us in the grip of sin. When we can somehow transcend that false self and connect to, if we use Paul Tillich’s term, ‘the ground of our being,’ there’s something sacred about that.” Later in my travels I would hear more about Tillich, the German theologian who, in perhaps his most famous essay, replaced the term “God” with the phrase “the ground of our being.”
“In a political and historical sense,” says Gramm, “Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address are the ground of our being. Because that’s who we are. That’s the only way that being American makes sense and differentiates us from anyone else.”