A century-and-half after Gettysburg, the nation continues to test its endurance

Many of them stand like pickets along what was 150 years ago the battle lines of the Union and Confederate armies at Gettysburg, monuments, memorials and markers to the estimated 165,000 soldiers who fought there – and thousands who died there – those three days in July 1863.

The South’s monuments appear relatively new compared to many of the North’s weathered edifices, and the reason for this raises the question about national unity since the Civil War divided the country over race and human rights.

America has undoubtedly made significant progress. In the last 150 years, African Americans have made an arduous journey from white men’s property, treated inhumanely and indifferently, to leaders in the nation that once enslaved them.

It’s something to marvel that a century-and-a-half after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the house once divided between North and South is led by a president who is not only African-American, but who is half black and half white.

Yet, since the guns of Gettysburg fell silent, blacks have endured endless battles in order to achieve equality in their own country, despite Lincoln’s proclamation freeing them; despite adoption of the Constitution’s 13^th amendment abolishing slavery; despite the 14^th amendment affirming citizenship and rights to all people regardless of race; and despite court decisions that shattered school segregation and upheld voting rights.

Our nation remains troubled over race. Just look at the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act that ensured states, particularly Southern states, could not deny blacks and other minorities their right to vote. Supporters of the decision seem unable to understand why African Americans are offended by this.

Is there somewhere in the murky recesses of the national psyche the sense that the country remains divided 148 years since the end of the Civil War?

The process of re-uniting the country after the war was hard. Reconstruction of the South was handled poorly by both sides, though could it have been handled any differently? Re-unification also was long; perhaps 100 years long, perhaps still going on in one form or another.

Consider one example: petitions signed by thousands of residents in as many as 40 states calling for their state to secede from the union while other states have pending bills in their statehouses to declare financial sovereignty from the federal government.

Monumental division

            Not long after the Civil War, Northern veterans began to erect granite obelisks, domed-temples and other edifices in Gettysburg. The monuments now litter the placid Pennsylvania farm fields and rocky slopes, where grave diggers collected about 9,000 soldiers of the blue and gray killed during the July 1-3 battle, which became the war’s turning point, leading to the South’s defeat two years later.

            Initially, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association focused on the Union monuments, buying land along the Union lines. None of the Southern states bothered to participate in securing land or proposing monuments on Confederate lines, according to Ronald Lee’s “The Origin and Evolution of the National Park Idea.”

One group of Confederate veterans did erect a battlefield monument in 1886, but the Southern states, partly because the war had depleted their treasuries, did not begin to erect monuments until 1917, the year the United States entered World War I. That year, Virginia built a massive edifice with a bronze Lee astride his horse, Traveller.     

            It became apparent that what was needed was a national park in which both sides were represented equally. In 1890, U.S. Rep. Byron Cutcheon of Michigan, who fought for the Union, made the first attempt to get a bill through Congress.

            The congressman commended the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association’s efforts as “a work of love and grateful pride to the loyal states,” but, he reminded fellow congressmen, “There were two armies in Gettysburg.”

            For the monuments to accurately reflect the history of the battle, and to properly preserve the battlefield, Cutcheon argued, it should not be left to the states, either North or South: “It must be done by the national government or remain undone.”

In 1895, Gettysburg became the first of the national parks and the overseer of all monuments. Yet, Confederate veterans, even with the battle now 32 years behind them, generally were not eager to erect monuments in a place of defeat for them.

It is an understandable attitude since soldiers are taught to hate the enemy, even if they happen to be their brothers. Long after the war and into the 20^th century, the South’s sons believed they were fighting “northern aggression.”

Northerner soldiers also viewed the conflict in narrow terms. Lincoln found it maddening at times when his generals failed to grasp the aim of the war. It was not to defeat an opposing nation, he would tell them, but to reunite a nation – a nation with a founding principle that all people are created equal.

            As General Robert E. Lee’s army retreated across the Potomac River to Virginia after the battle, Union General George Meade would telegraph the White House that he was pursing the “invaders” back to their country, to which Lincoln reminded him those invaders were his fellow countrymen. 

 

Reunions and reflections

            Sometime in the 1890s, a few veterans of the armies of the Potomac and Northern Virginia began to meet on occasion at small reunions. At one held in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love, the captured sword of Confederate Brig. General Lewis Armistead, killed at Gettysburg, was returned to the South.

The reunions helped to heal wounds made when the nation was split asunder, but they also, perhaps more so, allowed aging soldiers to reminisce. In 1908, a former Union general, Philadelphian Henry Shippen Huidekoper, made the suggestion to Pennsylvania Gov. Edwin Stuart about having a 50^th Gettysburg reunion at the battlefield and inviting as many veterans as possible.

The following year, the Legislature created the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg Commission and established the event’s first program, a “Peace Jubilee,” according to a report to the General Assembly. Congress appropriated $150,000 for the event and directed the War Department to build tent camps to accommodate the 53,000 veterans – only about 9,000 of them former Confederate veterans – who would attend.

At their 50^th reunion in 1913, the now elderly fighters were photographed wearing the blue and gray, standing on either side of a battlefield fence shaking hands. In fact, the former enemies greeted each other warmly, despite concern by one Southern colonel that “there might be unpleasant differences, at least, between the blue and gray.”

It was an electrifying moment, a reflection of national unity, but in 1913 African Americans still struggled in the South to achieve basic human and constitutional rights – living under white-instituted segregation that enslaved emotionally and psychologically.

While Gettysburg’s veterans spent six days reminiscing, parading, and accepting honors from President Woodrow Wilson – “We shall not forget the splendid valor” – the Ku Klux Klan roamed the South, terrorizing African Americans.  

The struggle against this tyranny went on for many decades, well into the middle of the 20^th century. Remnants of this oppression persist even today in the 21^st century as every presidential election reveals efforts to block or restrict minority voting rights.

 

Three Presidents      

            Many presidents have visited Gettysburg to offer gestures of peace and healing, but three – Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt – had led or would soon lead the nation through the crucible of major conflict that in its aftermath re-defined the nation.

            Lincoln arrived after the battle and consecrated the battlefield and the meaning of the war – “the proposition that all men are created equal” – with the Gettysburg Address that resonates as strongly today as it did in 1863.

Wilson, a Virginian born four years before the war broke out in 1861, came on the last day of the 1913 reunion to bless the Confederate and Union camaraderie and make an attempt at healing words: “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather … the quarrel forgotten.”

Yet, Wilson was a segregationist and, many historians believe, a racist, based on his own writings and actions. As president, his administration imposed harsh workplace policies that barred blacks from holding federal jobs. Hardly had the war been a quarrel nor had anyone forgotten it, least of all African Americans.

People are complicated, Wilson no less so. At his insistence during World War I,

African Americans received equal battle pay, but they fought in segregated units. 

            Roosevelt arrived by train from his home in Hyde Park, NY, for the 75^th and what would be the final reunion, in 1938. The battle’s last 25 veterans joined 1,800 veterans of the Civil War, most of them in their nineties. Some had to be carried.

On the last day in the northwest corner of the battlefield, two veterans, one Union and one Confederate, let fall the drape that covered the tall Eternal Light Peace Memorial that Roosevelt dedicated.

In his speech paying homage to the assembled veterans FDR was surely thinking about and seemed to even hint at, Europe’s gathering storm that would engulf the world in little more than a year: “It seldom helps to wonder how a statesmen of one generation would surmount the crisis of another.”

Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt understood the Civil War and Gettysburg’s symbolism was about how the nation would meet the endless challenges to its declared principles of equality and justice:

“The task assumes different shapes at different times. Sometimes the threat to popular government comes from political interests, sometimes from economic interests, sometimes we have to beat off all of them together. But the challenge is always the same – whether each generation facing its own circumstances can summon the practical devotion to attain and retain that greatest good for the greatest number which this government of the people was created to ensure.”

The 150^th Anniversary

The National Park employees at Gettysburg call the July 1-3 period the “high holy days,” according to recent news accounts. The battlefield and its nearly 1,400 monuments is a hallowed place for pilgrimage, a shrine for the history buff, re-enactor and the curious.  

An estimated 10,000 re-enactors dressed in blue and gray demonstrated the battle last week as part of the 150^th anniversary event, another 15,000 are expected for a re-enactment this week. Tens of thousands from the north, south, east and west are expected to attend the series of events planned this week.

They come to learn about the tactics and strategies of the battle, not whether the national unity and the struggle for equality and justice are causes everlasting. And there will be those with a Northern perspective – why did Lee send Gen. George Pickett into the last desperate charge that devastated his regiment and ended the battle? And with a Southern perspective – how did Mead win that fight?

One thing remains true about the country that, as Lincoln said, was “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We continue to test whether our nation, “so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”