I first became interested in the Civil War when I was fifteen, the year I began attending a small boarding school in southern Pennsylvania called Mercersburg Academy. I quickly learned that one of the girls’ dormitories—a brick structure well over a century old—was haunted. The building had been used as a field hospital during the Confederate army’s retreat from Gettysburg. The ghosts that wandered those halls were said to be the departed souls of Confederate soldiers. That’s when it dawned on me that just over forty miles to the east lay the greatest battlefield in American history.
On a cloudy fall day that same year my father drove me to Gettysburg where I stood on Cemetery Ridge for the first time. Standing near a row of westward-facing cannons we looked out across Emmitsburg Road and toward the open fields stretching almost a mile to Seminary Ridge. Over a century earlier, on July 3, 1863, General Robert E. Lee had ordered 12,000 men to cross that field and to take the high ground where we stood. Forever known after as Pickett’s Charge, those brave Southern soldiers crossed that open mile under a lethal hail of cannon and musket fire to try to break the Union line.
Looking out over that vast space, I began to realize the true meaning of courage. The entire American Civil War unfolded for me on this single field—two great armies, brothers and friends divided by a cause neither would yield, a gallant rush for victory. I was desperate to know more. Here was a history worth learning. Considered sacred ground, and consecrated by the blood of Americans, the battlefield has become a national monument to unity and peace. It is a timeless place that can help connect us, over a century later, to important deeds of the past.
“ 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 ... ”
—Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
But why should we care about history that is 150 years in our past? America has moved onward. We are a modern nation of the digital age, with smartphones and hybrid cars. Why do we need to learn about these dusty old stories from our past? Is it really all that important to retell them to new generations? What do we benefit from doing so? And why do we care about a single battle from a nineteenth-century war? These are all valid questions.
Bruce Catton was a great Civil War historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954. As a young boy growing up in the small town of Benzonia, Michigan, he would sit on the front porch of his neighbor’s house and listen to the stories of Union veterans. Speaking in 1961 on the meaning of the Civil War, Catton noted, “It was the biggest single event in our national history. In a way it is the central theme of our existence as a people; it is our Iliad, our Odyssey, the one tremendous legend that expresses what we are and what we mean. We can no more ignore it than we can ignore the American Revolution itself. Here was our most significant and tragic experience.”
If we are to understand ourselves as Americans and as a unified nation, we must have an understanding of the Civil War. Shelby Foote, an eminent historian from Mississippi, put it this way: “The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things ... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”
Gettysburg was one of the great turning points of American history. Certainly there were other battles and other turning points of equal importance that decided Union victory. Yet Gettysburg is the one battle Americans seem to remember the most. For the South, it was a supreme moment of honor, courage, and sacrifice for their cause of independence. For the North, it was another step toward what Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom.” What ultimately emerged from the Civil War was a united country free of slavery. Today, looking back, we understand that the war between North and South is the American story and in every way worth knowing so that we might better understand ourselves and our country.
The Emmitsburg road had been the last long mile for many men—for handsome John Reynolds riding to meet an unknown Southern sharpshooter in a farmer’s barn, for the black-hatted Western regiments with their fife-and-drum corps playing them into battle, for many unheard-of men who stepped off it into unmarked graves on slanting rocky fields—and for a few days it had been a famous military highway, pumping a stream of troops off to the unfathomable chances of war. Now it would be a quiet country road again, with a farmer’s load of hay or drove of cattle as its most exciting wayfarers, the mountain wall to the west dropping long shadows across it on the blue summer evenings, the dust and the clamor and the rumbling guns gone forever. It was over at last, this enormous battle with its smoke and its grimness and its unheard-of violence, and here again was a simple road leading from one country town to another, with a common-place little name that would ring and shine in the books forever.
—Bruce Catton