Gettysburg 150th

[Canoerebel]

Gettysburg's sesquicentennial begins tomorrow - the real meat of the battle beginning on June 30, 1863, and end on July 4, 1863. (Since the Confederates also surrendered at Vicksburg on July 4 of that year, some of us southerners jokingly contend that we don't celebrate the 4th of July.)

There's a blurb on the CNN website that I think is wrong. See what you think. Here's the story:

(CNN) -- "For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863."

So starts a powerful passage by William Faulkner in "Intruder in the Dust." The Mississippi novelist and poet poignantly painted the scene of dry-mouthed young men anticipating battle.

But the Confederate attack, known in the annals of history as Pickett's Charge, ended about a mile away in failure, gray-clad troops blunted by determined Union troops at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Those young boys recalled by Faulkner were stopped at the Angle, a stone wall considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy -- perhaps the last chance for victory in the U.S. Civil War. Instead, the Union prevailed at Gettysburg, a turning point in the four-year war that claimed at least 620,000 lives.

Faulkner isn't painting a scene of dry-mouthed youn men anticipating battle. He's painting a post-war scene, describing how for every southern boy since that fateful charge there comes a point in his mind where it's again 2 p.m. on July 3, 1863, just as Pickett's Charge is about to begin.

I think the CNN correspondent misses the point. Or did I miss the correspondent's point?

P.S. I wish I could be at Gettysburg for the festivities....but I can assure you I will be at Chickamauga this September for that battle's sesquicentennial observance.

[Walloc]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Gettysburg's sesquicentennial begins tomorrow - the real meat of the battle beginning on June 30, 1863, and end on July 4, 1863. (Since the Confederates also surrendered at Vicksburg on July 4 of that year, some of us southerners jokingly contend that we don't celebrate the 4th of July.)

Thats ok CR. You can start to celebrate my birthday instead [;)].. some unsubstantiated rumors say i turn 40 on thursday. Time pass fast... its been 8 years since i last spend a 4th of July in the US.

Kind regards,

Rasmus

[geofflambert]

Well, I interpret Faulkner to be saying that modern boys may imagine themselves there. They may also imagine themselves dry-mouthed (but I don't know where CNN got that). So far so good, CNN. But when they say "those young boys recalled by Faulkner" they've totally lost touch. Though there may well have been many 14 year olds at the battle, Faulkner couldn't be clearer that he was referring to modern youths.

[Symon]

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Gettysburg's sesquicentennial begins tomorrow - the real meat of the battle beginning on June 30, 1863, and end on July 4, 1863. (Since the Confederates also surrendered at Vicksburg on July 4 of that year, some of us southerners jokingly contend that we don't celebrate the 4th of July.)

There's a blurb on the CNN website that I think is wrong. See what you think. Here's the story:
<snip>
I think the CNN correspondent misses the point. Or did I miss the correspondent's point?

P.S. I wish I could be at Gettysburg for the festivities....but I can assure you I will be at Chickamauga this September for that battle's sesquicentennial observance.

First off Dan, I’m doing the Staff Ride at Chickamauga on Wednesday the 18th. Beaudy the wonder dog is in the doggie hotel till Monday the 23rd, so we could hook up maybe. I’ll have some time, and will have just gone over the ground with the Army pukes, for whatever that’s worth. Gimme a shout.

I do think CNN misses the point. Perhaps a better point is from the Gettysburg movie when they pan along Armistead’s line; this private is the grandson of a president, that private is the son of a governor, and on and on. Every young man (and middle aged and even old generals) on that field, South and North had dry mouths. That is what makes a soldier.

Gettysburg is not so much a celebration of a Northern victory as it is a recognition of the courage and sacrifice of American soldiers, whether North or South. Those fields, rocks, and slopes are Holy ground, for all of us. Modern interpretations just cheapen it.

ps, I'll have my flag out and I got two racks of baby backs and a poop load of silver queen corn, and me and my Alabama neighbors are gonna celebrate the 4th, as Americans.

Ciao, John

[Cap Mandrake]

I agree, Faulkner is clearly referring to post war Southern 14 year olds imagining what it must have been like and perhaps imagining that their participation might have resulted in a different outcome.


Of course, they might also be imagining that General Picket had just instructed them to "run along now and tell General Lee this is a really, really bad idea...oh...and be persuasive."

[JeffroK]

Or is he trying to suggest that pre-Picketts Charge the CSA had not yet lost the battle, and the war, and that every Southern boy thinks that given a chance that history could have changed and the CSA emerge victorious.

If that's correct, every Southern man wishes he were there.

[John 3rd]

That magnificent moment is SOOOOOOOOOO well created in the film Gettysburg. Pickett and Armistead and 15,000 men KNOWING what they were about to walk into yet THINKING they might succeed. Really recommend James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. Use it in my Civil War history classes. GREAT work.

[geofflambert]

I think the point is, is that in the time Faulkner was writing, and perhaps still today, 14 year old boys from the South identified with the Confederacy and believed somehow that their cause was just, and that somehow that battle could yet be won. We were still dealing with this dichotomy during WWII, during the desegregation of the armed forces, and still today.

[RevRick]

As long as there are people who think so little of themselves that the only way to feel as they have any worth is to put someone else down, tread upon them, and subjugate them, we will have that problem.

[Bullwinkle58]

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune today published a long 3-page article with maps and photos on a Minnesota soldier at the battle. He was detailed to the field hospital and only witnessed the slaughter of the 1st Minnesota in the action that held the Union line on the second day and probably swung the battle's outcome. This action resulted in the highest casualty percentage of any Union unit in the entire war.

He wrote two diaries through the war; one survives and the article prints extensive portions of the Gettysburg sections. He stayed there for weeks afterward, helping the wounded and burying hundreds of dead. This is a portion of the battle not often dealt with by historians more interested in the movements of the two armies in the days and weeks after the fighting. Worth a read.

http://www.startribune.com/local/212817 ... page=1&c=y
An excerpt:

"About 4 p.m. on July 2, Southern forces mounted a ferocious attack on Union soldiers under the command of Gen. Daniel Sickles, who shifted his men to higher ground near some peach trees west of Little Round Top, a move that left his flanks vulnerable.

Soldiers, their guns too hot to hold, resorted to hand-to-hand combat. Some even threw cobblestones at their enemy as control of a nearby wheat field changed hands a half-dozen times during two hours of relentless fighting.

Confederates swarming in from three sides finally broke Sickles’ line and his soldiers retreated in panic past the First Minnesota, standing by on the crest of a ridge.

Gen. Winfield Hancock, overseeing a corps that included the First Minnesota, moved his men a quarter-mile to fill the gap on Cemetery Ridge. The Minnesotans looked down the gently sloping pastureland to a marshy swale known as Plum Run.

About 262 Minnesotans on the ridge were all that stood between more than a thousand Confederate soldiers and the disaster they would cause if they managed to pour over the ridge and split the Union line.

With dead bodies punctuating the field, Hancock needed reinforcements. But first, he had to plug the collapsing line for five minutes to delay the Confederate advance until help could arrive.

“What regiment is this?” Hancock asked. Col. William Colvill, a lawyer and publisher from Red Wing, responded: “First Minnesota.”

“Charge those lines!” Hancock ordered. “Take them!”

William Lochren, an Irish-born soldier who would become a federal judge in Minnesota, heard Hancock’s order.

“Every man realized in an instant what that order meant — death or wounds to us all, the sacrifice of the regiment to gain a few minutes time and save the position, and probably the battlefield — and every man saw and accepted the necessity for the sacrifice.”

Marching at double-quick time with bayonets fixed, the First Minnesota charged down the incline into the whistling bullets, screeching shells and dense smoke unleashed by some 1,600 Alabamians.

“Bullets were coming like hailstones,” Sgt. John Wesley Plummer wrote to his brother back home, “whittling our boys like grain before the sickle.”

Stunned by the Minnesotans rushing toward them, the Confederate soldiers grew disorganized in the Plum Run bog. The five-minute charge had indeed thwarted the Southerners’ advance and saved the Union line on Cemetery Ridge."

[Walloc]

The 150th anniversery of Gettysburg supprisingly made it into a danish "news"paper. There is a 16 picture pictorial of the re-inactors at Gettysburg from yesterday, in todays paper.

Rasmus

[Capt. Harlock]

Those young boys recalled by Faulkner were stopped at the Angle, a stone wall considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy -- perhaps the last chance for victory in the U.S. Civil War. Instead, the Union prevailed at Gettysburg, a turning point in the four-year war that claimed at least 620,000 lives.

Faulkner isn't painting a scene of dry-mouthed youn men anticipating battle. He's painting a post-war scene, describing how for every southern boy since that fateful charge there comes a point in his mind where it's again 2 p.m. on July 3, 1863, just as Pickett's Charge is about to begin.

I think you're entirely right. For one thing, the average age in Pickett's Charge (or more formally, the Pickett-Pettigrew Assault) was not fourteen: the Confederacy didn't start "robbing the cradle and the grave" by expanding the age of conscription until later.

A secondary point is that I believe the Confederacy still had two later chances for victory: if they could have destroyed the armies of both Rosecrans and Burnside in Tennessee, and if they could have held Atlanta long enough to ensure Lincoln's defeat in the November 1864 election.

But this thread should probably not be in the AE section. [;)]

[Mundy]

Just spend the day last Thu at Gettysburg.&nbsp; I'll tell you, going in late June is different than going in April.&nbsp;
&nbsp;
Managed to hit Antietam two days before that.
&nbsp;
Ed

[bigred]

Mil History channel has a Gettysburg show tonight at 6pm

[whippleofd]

I live just south of Erie, PA so I've been there once a year since moving here 11 years ago. This year I'm arriving on 21 July and leaving on 26 July. It's going to be a might different this year as my son is now married and a 2nd Lt. stationed at Ft. Hood, Texas. We always went together, and he credits going to a different part of the battlefield each year as one of the three reasons he decided to join the Army. He said he could imagine the men standing there, shoulder to shoulder looking across those fields at each other and imagine one of them saying, 'If not me, who? If not now, when?" Col. Jac Jacob's book of the same name was the second.

Going to be all be all by myself, so if anyones going to be in the area during the week, drop me a line. I do have private matters to attend to each day till about 1500-1600, but I'm free afterwards. Based on the temp, it's not going to be much fun to go any earlier anyways.

Whipple

[topeverest]

Ahhh, to be at that time of year again in the USA. Probably will take the kiddies down to the reenactment.

Being an avid student of the battle & war as well as a veteran of dozens of walking trips to the battlefield, my 2 cents is that there was a genuine opportunity to deliver a desperate blow to the Union at Gettysburg on each of the three days during the battle. I subscribe to the theory that RE LEE was over confident. He did not exert effective leadership during the campaign nor did he listen to his trusted subordinates views. It is easy to blame many others, but the responsibility lies with REL. He was at his worst during the campaign, and specifically on July 3. He truly believed in the invincibility of his troops - and that the Union troops would not fight or be lead well. We all know how it turned out.

It is a poison pill many a leader has taken.

[John 3rd]

Would LOVE to be there right now!

[morejeffs]

I have to agree with you Topeverest. As brilliant as Lee was, he made the big (and wrong) decisions at Gettysburg.
He deserves (and gets) the respect due to him...But I think there is perhaps a bit too much veneration of him in southern legend
and this leads to a desire to protect his legacy....

Pickett`s charge was completely his order and it is hard to blame the subordinates for the failure of it.

[Skyros]

ORIGINAL: Mundy

Just spend the day last Thu at Gettysburg.  I'll tell you, going in late June is different than going in April. 

Managed to hit Antietam two days before that.

Ed

What did you find different, the heat or the foliage. Here is a pic I took in April 2011 and it was cold.

[Chickenboy]

For me Gettysburg is less a historical monument and more a graveyard.&nbsp; Some 51,000 Americans died fighting in those 3 days.&nbsp; Many of them buried on site.&nbsp; Such monumental self-inflicted carnage that it hurts me to contemplate.&nbsp; It hurts me to contemplate why some 650,000 of our best youth died over the course of the war against ourselves.&nbsp; To remember the American Civil War is to think about how very close we came to chaos, the abyss and&nbsp;national self-immolation.&nbsp; A warning from the pages of history, bought so dearly.
&nbsp;
I appreciate the military angle-who was where, when, how the battle raged, etc.&nbsp; But the predominant feeling I have for Civil War battlefields&nbsp;is sorrow, loss, and maybe a little bit of anger.