This past weekend we found ourselves with a free Saturday and everyone home – a rare occurrence. So we did the logical thing. We packed a cooler and hit the road.
In less than 40 minutes we were at the Gettysburg National Military Park, site of one of the most critical battles of the Civil War. Inside the visitor’s center and museum, we learned more about the three days of fierce fighting that occurred July 1-3, 1863.
We viewed artifacts from the war and saw a demonstration on the firearms used by soldiers. A volunteer showed us how to load the muskets for each shot – a process that allowed for three shots per minute (“but likely two shots per minute in the heat of battle,” he said) – and allowed us to briefly hold them to experience the weight.
Following sandwiches and cold sodas from the cooler, we drove to Little Round Top, a high point held and defended by the Union – and a key strategic position of the battle. For three days the Confederate Army tried to take the hill, at an awesome loss of life for both sides.
At a memorial for soldiers from New York state, a young couple wearing period clothing was greeting visitors. On a sunny, steamy afternoon, the man wore the uniform of a Union soldier: boots, navy blue wool trousers, a navy blue coat buttoned over a white long-sleeve cotton shirt, and a navy blue wool hat. The young woman wore a long cotton dressed with buttoned at the neck, along with a cotton slip, full bonnet, and leather boots. Dressed in shorts, t-shirts, and sunglasses, we didn’t complain much about the weather after that.
We talked with the couple for a few minutes, and asked them if they had a good story for us. The soldier (we later learned his name was Dave Hancock) said that if we wanted to take a short walk, he had “a heckuva story about the 20th Maine.”
So we took a walk.
In a clearing in the dense woods, he described the courageous efforts of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, ordered to hold their position under all circumstances to protect the flank of the Union line at Little Round Top. We stood on the Maine’s line, and saw the woods where the vaunted 15th Alabama Regiment (which had never lost a skirmish) attacked repeatedly. As we listened, we could almost see the ferocious battle in the trees and hear the frenzied chaos as the boys of the 20th Maine “closed the gate” and defeated the mighty Alabamians.
At the bottom of the valley, we scrambled through Devil’s Den, a clustered rock formation 500 yards below the Union line. We steadied ourselves behind the granite and sighted imaginary sniper rifles toward the monuments on the hill – the view of Confederate marksmen who rained lead on the Union troops above.
As we left, we thought about the courage and sacrifices of so many men and their families made to protect the Union – along with the bravery of the Confederates who fought for their cause before being welcomed back. Casualties numbered more than 46,000 during those three days of fighting, including nearly 8,000 dead.
We also thought of the burden placed on the people of Gettysburg (population 2,500 at the time) who had to care for the wounded, bury the dead, and repair their town.
Our path out of the park took us past the National Cemetery where Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, honoring fallen warriors and extolling the purity of their cause in as eloquent a speech as has ever been given – all, as Colin pointed out, in fewer words than are printed on a Lay’s potato chip bag:
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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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.
