A Carriage Ride from Home

The Georgetown Pike Bridge, near where
the 87th Pennsylvania bathed in their own
blood. / PD LOC

Elias Sheads Jr. worked in his father's shop. They made wagons and coaches, some of the bedrock laborers in Gettysburg's society. In 1860, when census taker Aaron Sheely walked the streets of the borough counting heads and recording in vivid detail what Gettysburg looked like, Elias lived with his mother and father.

Gathered around their table were his brothers and sister. David and Louisa were a few years older than the 19-year-old Elias. Robert and Jacob were his younger brothers, 16 and 14-years-old, who likely helped out around the shop when they weren't studying.

When the war began, Elias leapt to the call. Literally in war's first moments, immediately after Lincoln put out the call for volunteers, Elias signed his name on a form and marched to Harrisburg to join the troops who would end the rebellion swiftly and decisively.

In 90 days, he was discharged and America was shown this might not be a quick war.

So Elias joined the army again.

While he was gone, most of Elias father's market for carriages had likely dried up. Did the family need that money now? Was it helping make up for the cash that no longer flowed from wealthy, carriage-buying slaveholders in the Shenandoah Valley? Elias, to some extent, was helping to destroy his family's livelihood while he marched in the United States army. The slave wealth of the South paid for the fancy carriages he built in a previous lifetime.

By July of 1864, the 87th Pennsylvania had seen blood. And as rebels again charged toward the border, they were detailed from Petersburg's defenses to head toward Washington City and protect it from the oncoming tide of Early's raid on the Capital.

Gettysburg knew just moments after the fighting stopped that a battle had happened at Frederick, Maryland. But who was there? Were they dead?

Did Mary Sheads frantically search the columns of the Compiler on the 11th or the Adams Sentinel on the 12th, looking for Elias' name?

Or by now had he been gone so long, been threatened so many times in her imagination, that it was a mundane slow finger rolling down those columns? After seeing the suffering of last summer in her own streets, was her search now simply for the inevitable, not the dreaded? Was war normal by this its fourth long, hot summer?

In a field south of Frederick, Elias Sheads Jr. suffered the inevitable. The 87th was standing astride the Thomas Farm, Georgians charging headlong into their lines. A fragment of shell sailed through the air and buried itself into Elias' shins. Both his feet were shattered, blown to pieces, sheared clean off.

Elias Sheads Jr.'s final trip home
ended here. / Find-A-Grave

Elias Sheads Jr. died a short carriage ride from home.

He had worked wood with his father, driven pins and nails, laid down leaf springs and set axles. He had built the wagons which easily rolled between Gettysburg and Frederick before this cruel war. He used to make the world smaller, the distances shorter. He and his father transformed a few days' walk into a few hours' ride. If only he could make that ride, leap into a carriage and just go home.

But he couldn't. Instead, he lay, bloody stumps where his feet used to hold him up as he worked. Just a stone's throw from his father and mother, from David and Louisa and Robert. A stone's throw from safety at home.

His body made that one last trip his conscious mind never could. Elias Sheads Jr. was buried atop Cemetery Hill in Evergreen Cemetery.

As soft earth was moved in Gettysburg, somewhere in the trenches around Petersburg, Elias' little brother Jacob stood in the ranks. The 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry, lately transformed into infantry, was moving back and forth along the line, preparing for fight after fight. Jacob, who went by James, was nearly 18-years-old.

Another of Mary Sheads' boys was just waiting for the inevitable.

One Year On: New Gettysburgians

How many new citizens were there in
Gettysburg who looked just like these
men and women, drinking in freedom
for their first July 4th. / PD LOC

It's been one year since freedom was preserved on a black man's farm.

It's been one year since the rebel charge of men from North Carolina and Virginia crashed against Abraham Brien's stone wall and were repelled, since men from South Carolina and Maryland found their best laid plans for independence dashed upon the rocks of Emancipation and American Liberty. And in the intervening year, many of Gettysburg's black citizens, who had fled from rebel capture, have slowly returned.

Now it is the time in 1864 to celebrate that moment of victory, to celebrate American freedom. But Gettysburg's black population has changed as that celebrating began 150 years ago.

New faces milled in the street. Were Greenburg Madison or Jesse Nelson or William Hill preparing for their first July 4th in freedom? Each was a black refugee from the south. Madison and Hill hailed from Virginia, Nelson from Maryland. They are names in an 1864 draft register, exempt from compulsory service because the war would decide who they were. But if you asked any of them, would they deny being men? Would they deny being citizens?

James Royer was somewhere in Gettysburg too. He was 25 years old, working at a local restaurant or tavern as a waiter. In a previous lifetime, Royer had been a slave in Virginia. Now he was contraband in Gettysburg, his freedom hanging in the balance of the war. The gears were grinding slowly against slavery; the Senate was working to once and for all free Royer from fear. This year would be a true Independence Day for the young man.

William Wilson was a bit older. The 38-year-old man was born into slavery in South Carolina. He was married. And now he was a free man in the town where freedom had been defended, defined and ensured. Michael Fender was just like Wilson. He was a year younger, a lowly laborer, a runaway from slavery and a newly free citizen of Gettysburg. Contraband or not, July 4th would feel sweet this side of the Mason-Dixon line.

America is a promise. It's a promise penned by a secretive cabal of men in a hot, sticky room in Philadelphia in 1776. It's a promise proclaimed on the steps of that building a couple days later.

And after that promise was penned, John Adams, a member of that cabal declared that that promise would, "be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America." Adams believed, "that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty."

But it shouldn't just be a staid celebration. "It ought to be solemnized," he wrote his wife jubilantly, "with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

If ever there were men who had reason to heed John Adams' advice, who should solemnize thorough tumult and exhalation, they were Madison, Nelson, Hill, Royer and Wilson. Freedom was real for perhaps the first time, one year on.

One Year On: June 28th

A year ago, rebels swarmed the street. Now they don't. A year ago, the town was on edge. Now it's not. A year ago, time stood still. Now it rushes on.

"The arrangements are in process of completion," the Adams Sentinel trumpeted, "for a handsome celebration at Culp's Hill." The town was organizing a grand picnic. The moment wasn't simply for the people of the borough so recently made famous by fate and bad luck. "There will be many strangers here," the newspaper's tight print reminded Gettysburgians, "and we hope that every one of our citizens will have a pride in sending them away pleased with our town and its surroundings, as they did on the 19th November."

Shopkeeper John L. Schick was pooling the resources for the meal. A year ago, he had been staring at the empty shelves of his store in the waning days of June; any stock of value had been sent toward Carlisle, safely out of rebel hands. But this year, June was different. His store was filling up with donations from around the borough, just like it had filled up with donations from around the nation when the United States Christian Commission used it as a storehouse.

Somewhere else in town, a bevy of local Republicans were making plans for celebration on the battlefield. They promised pomp and circumstance. The Governor himself (undoubtedly helped along by the party affiliation of the organizing committee) would be speaking. "The ceremonies are expected to be," the committee announced, "of a most interesting and imposing character."

The nation too was slightly different since last year. Adjacent to the Sentinel's notice of the Governor's planned attendance was a short article on Maryland's new constitution. The southerly neighbor was finally catching up with the Keystone state, who had begun the process of destroying slavery in 1780 and finally placed it firmly into its well-deserved grave in 1847. The new constitution would read: "Hereafter, in this State, there shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude, except in punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; and all persons held to labor, as slaves, are hereby declared free."

Though slavery might linger in Virginia as long as war held out, Adams County was now assured that by year's end, she would no longer be the frontline of the ideological war over human freedom.

The prospect of what freeing the slaves might mean was shifting too. "I cannot resist the temptation to inform you of the bravery of the colored troops in this department," a soldier in the 2nd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery reported in the folds of the Sentinel. "Yesterday they were thoroughly tested, and the result was the capture of seven forts, seventeen pieces of artillery, and several hundred prisoners." They were brave and true, the type of hearty stock worthy of the title 'citizen.' And every rumor against the fitness of these black men to have that honorific, to be known as men, was false. "As to the report heretofore of them breaking and running from the enemy, I believe it to be a very great mistake, for I saw last evening that they were more desperate than any body of men put in action during this war."

A year before, as June 28th dawned, Gettysburg was still catching its breath from one rebel invasion. It was still worried about another which might come. But today, the world was different at its very core.

Name Calling: It's What's Not There That Matters

Perhaps Lincoln left behind some
sour grapes at the Wills House in 1863.

The article in the Adams Sentinel May 17th, 1863 was innocent enough.

David McConaughy, prominent local lawyer, moderate Republican and progenitor of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association was passing along a simple request. "I am very anxious to have a collection of trophies and interesting relics from the Battle-field of Gettysburg," Margaretta Meade wrote to McConaughy. The famed General's wife was appealing to Gettysburg to create one of the central attractions for the Great Central Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia that summer.

"I am sure," Meade continued, "that you will agree with me in thinking that a collection, coming from a place, which will always be memorable in the history of our country, will be an object of great interest and curiosity."

And Gettysburg responded.

McConaughy traveled the town. Reading his list of signatories in order is like walking Gettysburg's streets door to door. First, McConaughy climbed Seminary Ridge and had Dr. Schmucker and Dr. Krauth at the Lutheran Seminary. Then he returned to the center of town, rounding the Diamond and garnering support from aging tavern owner John H. McClellan, shopkeepers John L. Schick and George Arnold along with newspaper editor John T. McIlhenny. Down Baltimore Street, McConaughy met the Fahnestock Brothers. Ricocheting across the town, the journey ended on the campus of Pennsylvania College, where professors Huber, Muhlenberg, Stoever and Jacobs signed their names.

Through that journey across the borough, gathering the names of nearly every upstanding moderate and Republican town leader, one name was conspicuously missing: David Wills.

A missing name might not seem earth shattering at first. But there might be more to the omission than simply missing Will's door, forgetting a street in town. McConaughy after all lifted the heavy knocker on Joel B. Danner's front door, spitting distance from Wills' home and office.

The date of Margaretta Meade's request and McConaughy's response shed a bit more light on the question. The wife of the great hero General of Gettysburg wrote McConaughy on April 1st; the local lawyer replied with his attached list of supporters almost immediately. But the note wasn't published in the Sentinel until May 17th.

The letters appeared May 17th, long after the call and long after shells need be collected. But it did appear just 7 days after the Adams Sentinel briefly announced that, "Persons having articles for the 'Great Sanitary Fair,'" could drop their wares and goods at, "the general depository for the county." And that depository just so happened to be, "at the house of David Wills, in the Borough of Gettysburg."

McConaughy would not be outdone. Wills had his laureled Cemetery; McConaughy had his prestigious Memorial Association.

And if David Wills' wife was grasping for the honor of coordinating the county's support of the war effort, McConaughy would at least leave a breadcrumb trail of evidence that he too deserved some of the accolades and credit.

Even a simple request for help, a fundraiser to support the troops, can get perverted by petty local politics.

Confederates in the Swimming Pool

I was swimming last night and thinking about dead Confederates. Someday, it's utterances like that which are going to see me involuntarily committed to an asylum. But it's true. I swam and thought about dead Confederates.

My pool is on Seminary Ridge at the YWCA Gettysburg & Adams County, just down the street from our house. That likely starts to explain why I was thinking of dead Confederates. Here, on the slope of Seminary Ridge, the YWCA sits just adjacent to the Seminary Campus. It's been there for quite a while, that pool was dug in 1980. Before it moved to its new home on Seminary Ridge, the YWCA was downtown, in the home where the Danner family weathered the storm of battle on the Diamond in town.

So, as I tread water in the deep end of the pool, I thought about the space I was occupying. It is water now, but in 1863 it was dirt, the fields behind a school dedicated to peace which saw too much war. And, with dead bodies trickling out the door of the Seminary hospital, those fields began filling with the stiffened bodies of men.

I was swimming, likely, in a grave last night. I pencil-dove as deep at I could, trying to get down to six feet, trying to dive down to those graves.

But as came back to the surface, I realized six feet was an unknown luxury in 1863. Rushed comrades dug as deep as they could. But hundreds were scattered dead across those fields and there just weren't enough hours or energy.

So I headed toward the shallow end of the pool. In three feet of water, I touched the tiled floor of the pool.

But even that was too deep.

I tend to sit on kickboards in the water when I'm lazing in a pool, hovering on the foam core chunks like a swing with no ropes. And it was at that moment I realized that was the perfect depth. I was sitting on the floor of a grave in the pool, just deep enough to cover over some poor soldier's face.

Time changes places, it has changed that ridge in small ways here and there. And one of those changes helps visualize the past, even if by mistake.

So I swam where Confederates (and likely many Federal soldiers too) once lay.

Was I swimming where William T. Watts was once buried? The 26-year-old man was wounded on July 3rd in the left foot. Surgeons in the Seminary Hospital took a chunk of the flesh and bone away, removing a few toes and metatarsals. But infection set into what was left of his foot, and he died on the 29th of August.

That past December, Watts fled the 4th Virginia Infantry for a few months, deserting the army, but returning by February of 1863. As he lay in the Seminary dying in agony, you can't help but wonder if he wished he had never returned, wished he hadn't come back, wished he'd stayed somewhere safe instead of having half his foot hacked off in some godforsaken house of God.

So now, when I go swimming, I'll be thinking just a little bit about William Watts and his comrades. When I sit on a kickboard, I'll probably remember I'm sitting on the floor of his former grave. I just can't help but think of these things. When I'm swimming, it only makes sense to think of dead Confederates' graves.

Because history is a disease of the mind, and I'm sick.

Gettysburg's New Dawn, 1864

The first few days of January are usually crisp and cold in Gettysburg. Sometimes there is frost or snow, sometimes not. Sometimes there is a bitter wind, sometimes not. Sometimes there is sun bleeding across the horizon and splashing a cloudless sky, sometimes there is not. But the new year here, like everywhere else, stands as a symbol of promise and hope for the future.

And nowhere, during those bitter cold first few days of January, 1864 needed hope more than Gettysburg. For the many Lutheran men and women milling through the streets, the language of John of Patmos' Revelation might have been the most honest description of the last year. "Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth." Gettysburg had been drenched in wrath.

But even in the slowly healing craggy wasteland that surrounded Gettysburg, there was hope. And unlike John's vision of the great showdown of heavenly host, this hopeful message rhymed.

A year has passed, and on the walls of time,
We hear the distant echoes of its chime,
And now, as often in the days of yore,
The Carrier comes unto each patron's door,
And shall, in simple and in honest verse,
The glorious scenes of the past year rehearse;
And praise the heroes who, in noble strife,
Fell nobly fighting for the Nation's life.

For the men and women who lived here, the meaning of their struggle of the last year was abundantly clear. In the "Carrier's Address to the Patrons of the Adams Sentinel," in the newspaper's first issue of 1864, the meaning of battle at Gettysburg was laid out for anyone who cared to follow the lilting verse. Stanza after stanza whips by, as the poet describes how, when the rebels plowed through the fields, "with their flag of 'bars,'" the heroes of the townspeople had flying over their shoulders, "the gallant 'stripes and stars.'"

A clash not unlike that in Revelation had happened here, as "host met host." Yet still, "like old Ocean's rock, / Our boys withstood the fiery charge and shock." The sainted sons of the United States prevailed, "and Heaven smiled as we the victory won."

Then the poet pivots, because this town had seen so much more than just three days of carnage in the past year. Those burning few moments of carnage had only been 4/5th of a percent of the year's days, hours and seconds. But those fleeting moments of fire shifted the course of all the months which followed.

Suddenly, the poet brings down upon Gettysburg not armies, but throngs of visitors. We are standing in November. And we start to see the meaning of it all — Freedom.

The scene is changed! What means this concourse vast?
Has some bright fairy's wand been o'er us cast?
For lo! behold! the dignitaries of our land
Are here together, as one common band;
While thousands upon thousands come,
Each from their far and distant home.
What brings them here? It is to see
The graves of those who died to make us free;
To consecrate the Cemetery for the dead,
Who nobly for our Union their blood shed.

Gettysburg had been etched into eternity, the name of a place forever known for a few simple acts: killing and speaking. But the future was still unclear. How soon, "Disunion's swelling flood," would take to crest and fall again was still unclear. "But if the cloud that now dark o'er us lowers, Should burst upon us its ensanguined showers," the Carrier assured the borough, "Yet like the far-famed Nazarite of old, We to the pillars of the fane shall hold, And the same shock that ruin round us throws, Shall hurl destruction on our common foes."

Gettysburg had seen the worst of war. But something else had sprung from that bloodsoaked stem: hope. The war, for much of the nation, had seemed to change in that first week of July. The carnage was awful. The loss was appaling. But out of that destruction, there seemed the glimmering light of an oncoming dawn. Like a small glowing ember, it must be kindled into a flame, then a fire, but it was there.

If this small town of a few thousands people could find their hope in the bloodsoaked ground outside their doors and the bloodsoaked shirtsleeves which hung around their wrists half-a-year earlier, there was hope enough for the nation.

War was far from over, but if Americans kept blowing on that ember, cupping their worn, calloused and bloodstained hands to its feeble warmth, the great fire of peace might again blaze in the hearths of the nation.

1864 would be another long year of war. It would prove to be the war's last long year. But for the men and women standing in Gettysburg's frigid streets on New Years Day 1864, that war had no end yet. It was an eternal war. And peace was still a long ways off.

Scalia: A Real Gettysburg Address

USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas, as he introduced the most potent speaker in Tuesday morning's ceremonies at Gettysburg, called it a, "special day," both in the lives of the handful of men and women raising their hands to take the oath of allegiance and become American citizens, but also, "in the life of our country."

Gettysburg, this place I call home, is momentous. Sometimes we lose that fact when we drive through the streets to get a quart of milk or head to the office. What happened here 150 years ago was truly a special moment in America's life. And no one underlined that fact better than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

I don't agree personally with the Justice's politics. It's tough to imagine Scalia, a strict Constitutional constructionist, adequately commemorating a speech which declared that the Declaration of Independence, America's founding in thought, trumped the Constitution's founding in law. But that's exactly what he did.

His words were brief. But unlike much of what was belabored, prepared and read aloud Tuesday morning, Scalia's words were spontaneous and heartfelt. We live in an era of prepared and formal, vetted and predetermined. The heartfelt and spontaneous shines when it happens.

Scalia's remarks were powerful precisely because they didn't try to address Lincoln. They only glancingly addressed the cemetery and the dead.

But what Scalia did do was talk about being an American, about the promise of the very word. And Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is about nothing but the promise of being American, the necessity of preserving that promise and, most crucially, extending it to larger groups of Americans, new and old.

I'm not sure the Justice even realized what he was doing was perfect. Instead of spending his moments at the podium before administering the oath praising Lincoln, instead of revamping or rephrasing 272 words, instead of at great lengths dissecting a piece of pure American art, Scalia said something new for today, for us.

And the most crucial strength?

Scalia said, "I," and, "my." He spoke from his heart, he spoke personally. And in doing so, he captured the meaning of the day, of the anniversary, of being American.

You can watch a video of this morning's ceremony here (skip ahead to 1 hour, 17 minutes). Or read a transcript below:

The morning sun silhouettes
the Address monument.

Before I administer the oath, I want to say a few words of welcome to the new citizens. What makes us Americans, what unites us, is quite different from that which unites other countries.

There's a word, 'unAmerican.' We used to have a House unAmerican Activities Committee. There's no equivalent word in foreign languages. It would mean nothing in French political discourse to refer to something as unFrench, or in German political discourse to refer to something as unGerman. It is only Americans, we Americans, who identify ourselves not by our blood or by our color, or by our race or by where we were born, but rather by our fidelity to certain political principles.

That's very strange. It's unique in human history, I believe.

We are, as you heard from the Director [of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] a nation of immigrants, who have come here mostly for two reasons. First, for freedom. From the pilgrims in the 17th century to the Cubans and the North Koreans in the 20th and 21st centuries.

And that freedom, of course, is not free, as the dead who rest buried here can demonstrate. The last line of our 'Star Spangled Banner' is, 'the land of the free and the home of the brave.' The two go together. Freedom is for the brave.

The second reason they came, these immigrants, was for opportunity. My father, who was the most patriotic man I ever knew, used to say that in the old country, if your father was a shoemaker, you would be a shoemaker. And in America, you could be whatever you were willing to work hard enough to be and had the talent to be.

And his son ended up on the Supreme Court.

My Grandmother expected me to be President; I didn't quite make that. (Audience Laughter) But it was possible. It is possible in America.

So welcome, my soon-to-be fellow citizens, to the nation of Americans. May America bring you all that you expect from it. And may you give it all that it expects from you.

Martin L. Stoever: Moving His Abolition Needle

Two letters appeared in the Lutheran and Missionary in the late summer of 1864 signed, "M.L.S."

The summer session had ended at Pennsylvania College. The campus was quiet, the classrooms were empty. For professors at the college, the brief breaks between semesters were a much-needed respite from the daily grind of professorial life. Any sane professor would use the few brief moments to unwind.

But for Martin Luther Stoever, who had begun the war as a simple professor of Latin, Literature and History, too much had gone by to sit idle. Witnessing the work of the United States Christian Commission in the month after the battle of Gettysburg, operating out of the vacant store on the first floor of his home, Stoever saw firsthand how Christian precepts might ease the pain of the suffering soldier. By 1864, Stoever was heading up Gettysburg's new local chapter of the Christian Commission, organizing supplies and coordinating donations.

But in the summer of 1864, he might have done more.

During Pennsylvania College's break that summer, an aid worked arrived on the outskirts of Petersburg, Virginia. "You will no doubt be surprised to receive a letter from me at this point," the correspondent opened. "I have been here for some days, among the wounded and the dying."

Martin Luther Stoever had seen suffering on a battlefield before. In the months after the battle at Gettysburg, Stoever moved from field hospital to field hospital, aiding the wounded and praying with the dying.

The letter in the Lutheran and Missionary noted all of the valorous shows of courage by the Federal soldiers as they suffered after the assault on the Weldon Railroad. TIn their sufferings, these men were, "showing the spirit of our noble soldiers who are willing to endure so much for the cause of freedom. It is a costly sacrifice. Many victims are required to secure the end. But it is only through tribulation, that great results are achieved."

Before the war, Martin Luther Stoever made a last ditch effort (as did many Americans) to stave off war. He signed a set of petitions from citizens of Adams County supporting compensated emancipation and forced colonization. America's sundry colonization societies were the most lackluster of abolitionist, believing that black shouldn't be slaves, but also shouldn't be Americans.

But something shifted for Stoever as the war dragged on.

In 1864, the correspondent to the Lutheran and Missionary noted he was, "very much interested in what I saw of our colored troops. They are noble, brave men, their hearts earnestly in the work, and many of them sincere Christians." One he met was from nearby Hagerstown, Maryland and knew some of the author's friends. When questioned whether he was afraid of battle, the black soldier responded resolutely, "No! God will take care of me. When I started in defence of my country I determined to stand by her till I died."

"This," M.L.S. noted, "is the spirit which I have seen exhibited by many of these men. God, in his wondrous providence, is doing marvellous things by means of this war... One of the results will be the elevation of the African race, in the confidence it has isnpired in themselves, in making them, as well as others, feel that they have capacities, that they are immortal beings, that they can accomplish something for the good of their fellowmen."

The following year, when Abraham Lincoln was murdered by a bloodthirsty zealot, Professor Stoever confessed in a eulogy to Lincoln that, "we must now admit, even if we did not before, that there is a barbarism in slavery."

Slavery, made incarnate in the rebellious Southern nation, had, "showed its real character in the various atrocities committed during the war, in the heartless treatment of our prisoners, in the brutal massacre of our colored troops, in plotting arson, in attempting to diffuse malignant disease, in commissioning its secret emissaries to burn and pillage our large towns and cities, in striking at every thing that opposed its progress and perpetuity, and crowned its wicked career in the perpetration of a crime unknown in our history," the murder of the President.

Stoever was quite clear on how America could best remember their fallen chieftan:

It is a duty, then, we owe to the memory of the illustrious dead, that this evil be utterly eradicated, that the letter and spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation, be fully acknowledged and faithfully executed; that domestic slavery be forever obliterated from American soil, that the great principles which underlie our Government be vigilantly guarded, that hereafter all, who live beneath the folds of the American flag, be protected in their inalienable rights and treated as freemen, and every human being occupy the position assigned him by his Creator."

Something made that historian's mind shift and change, morph and progress. Perhaps that something was a trip south in 1864, and an opportunity to see black men fighting valiantly for their nation, and kindly shake their hands.

America's Pastime: Base Ball's Battlefields

Somewhere in a field just north of the Pennsylvania College campus, a hurler threw a ball to a striker. The air was undoubtedly crisp. Novembers in Gettysburg can be cool. The local papers were already predicting that the winter of 1865-66 would come on early and bitter. Standing on the bases, men readied to run home and score another point for their team.

Beneath their feet, the frosty ground certainly crinkled and cracked. The game was the last of the season between the Aurora Base Ball Club and the Gettysburg Base Ball Club. The bat swung, wood connected with leather, and the run was driven home.

On the horizon just to the west of campus loomed Oak Ridge, where Federal troops had stood against a North Carolinian tide. To the north rose Blocher's Knoll, recently renamed Barlow's Knoll after the young commander whose men had retreated off of the soft hill. Exactly two years earlier, the President had arrived in town and Gettysburg rejoiced all night long. Now that President was dead, the intractable war was over and a new struggle over civil rights was emerging.

But today all eyes were on the game. Strikes and misses were called by local attorney A.J. Cover. The game continued and the score mounted. In the 3rd inning, the Gettysburg Club bested the Aurora boys, students of Pennsylvania College, 3 runs to 2. Last week's game had been a rout; Aurora beat Gettysburg 55 runs to 40.

The local citizens intended to put up a fight against the college kids today.

If a stray foul ball rolled back toward the College Edifice it might have hit a few mounds of earth or a wooden board, remnants of the battle fought there just a couple years before.

Would it have knocked into the last earthly reminder of Lieutenant William Cornelius Austin? The Lieutenant marched into battle at Gettysburg alongside his men in the 18th Virginia. Austin was struck in the left knee and foot by enemy fire on July 3rd, 1863. He died shortly after and was lain beneath foreign Pennsylvania soil behind the college's main academic building.

Perhaps the ball would have rolled to a stop above the mouldering bones of Daniel Wilson Partin. The private took a round to the left arm, just above the elbow on July 3rd while fighting in the 14th Virginia. Sheltered in the College's halls of learning, Partin lingered until the 23rd of July when he breathed his last. A wood board was carved and placed at his head bearing simply the misspelled inscription "Porton."

The crusty November ground saw grounder after grounder, run after run pound across it. The townie Gettysburg club and the student-led Aurora club fought valiantly for nine solid innings.

South of town, work progressed on a massive monument to the battle and the nation's dead at the center of the National Cemetery. And in the nearby Evergreen Cemetery, frozen earth was moved by pick and shovel for even more sainted dead. Each week pine coffins arrived in town in rail cars, native sons making the last trip back to Gettysburg. The Monday after the fierce base ball contest was ended, just two days away, two more coffins would arrive. One held the body of Isaac Sheads, returning home sealed in a wooden crate, never again to rise.

Sheads met his fate at the battle of Cold Harbor on the outskirts of Richmond in June of 1864. The 49-year-old carriage-maker died fighting alongside his comrades in the 87th Pennsylvania. The cold ground would fold over his rotting corpse just a week after the base ball game.

Behind the College buildings, the Gettysburg Base Ball Club was fairing well, mainly because of one star player: Theodore C. Norris. Norris pitched a decent game, giving up only 12 runs (the previous week's pitcher had given up 40 runs).

But more importantly, Theodore Norris crossed home five times, never being tagged or caught out through the whole game.

Norris had only been back in Gettysburg for five months. In late June, he began a long journey northward from New Bern, NC. The 28-year-old Gettysburgian spent most of the war serving in the 87th Pennsylvania. At Cold Harbor in 1864, he helped lead his company into action. Lieutenant Norris survived to play base ball with his friends in Gettysburg; Sheads was killed and buried in some godforsaken tangle of brush in Virginia.

America was a land changed. Soldiers brought a new game back home, a game which would infect the American soul. Some of the scars of that war which had killed over 600,000 souls would fade. Some were more permanent. Base ball, it seemed, was one of those permanent reminders of the war.

The Gettysburg Base Ball Club and the Aurora Base Ball Club walked off the field after nearly 3 hours of combat. They knocked the frozen soil from their shoes. The students from the college had bested the team from the town in gentlemanly combat.

As they walked to their warm homes along Gettysburg's streets or cozy rooms inside the College Edifice, they left behind those frozen Confederate bodies beneath the campus' ground. Somewhere rolling north in a cold boxcar, Isaac Sheads' body wended its way home. South of town, a monument to the valiant men who perished on a hot July day stood frosty and incomplete.

America was a land forever changed; Gettysburg was a land forever changed.

Echoes on the Gettysburg Battlefield

Back at the beginning of the summer, I was asked by the College to write a piece on the history of the battle and its many resonances for what turned out to be an obscure periodical and not the actual USA Today. That means next to no one got the chance to read the piece, which I was quite happy with. So I wanted to share that piece with all of you.

How does Gettysburg's unique history echo backwards and forwards?

CC / Wikipedia

On the afternoon of July 1st, 1863, an artillery shell passed through the upper floor of Dr. Henry Huber’s house in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It sailed in to the brick wall, punching a clean hole near a window and shattering glass as down in the streets below Federal soldiers retreated from a horde of onrushing Confederates. Plaster fell to the floor inside the home. The shell kept flying, piercing another of Dr. Huber’s walls, driving back through another brick wall and sailing on its way. The Huber family saw war pass through their home in the guise of a steaming, speeding hunk of iron.

War changes landscapes. It is what war does first and foremost. Whether it is a beach in Normandy morphed from quiet seaside to hellish, pockmarked moonscape or a peaceful library reduced to jagged rubble in Sarajevo, war destroys. It destroyed a few bricks in a wall and some window glass for Dr. Henry Huber, local doctor and Pennsylvania College instructor, in 1863.

But war touches more than buildings. War touches people.

The Huber family had felt war before. Their son Frederick, a promising young man who hoped to be a doctor, was killed a year earlier fighting with the United States army at Fair Oaks on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. “It is only when we see those who left us… returning with mangled form,” Huber wrote of his son, “or stricken down in the prime of life, that we can realize the horrors of our war.”

Gettysburg, at its heart, is the story of America. It is the story of who we are as a people and how we’ve moved through the rivers of time. Sometimes that tale is about sorrow, like that felt in Henry Huber’s parlor in 1862. Sometimes it is about joy, hope and opportunity. As with anywhere in our grand narrative, there are heroes, there are villains and there are those men and women who you can never quite categorize. Gettysburg seems like it is a place stuck in time, forever trapped in three days in July of 1863.

But it simply is not. Gettysburg is as much about who we are and where we are at today as it is about men suffering, fighting and dying in some godforsaken farm field one hundred and fifty years ago.

Just down the street from Henry Huber’s house, on the campus of Pennsylvania College (modern day Gettysburg College), president and professor Henry Louis Baugher felt war too. His son Nesbitt was wounded in spring of 1862 at Shiloh in Tennessee. The college president rushed to his son’s side, only to watch helplessly as his son took a turn for the worse, and now the, he later wrote, “the soldier is once more in the battle field, and it is his last.” Nesbitt Baugher died in May of 1862, and his father brought his body home to Gettysburg to be laid to rest.

Everywhere you turn in Gettysburg, you find these stories. They are the stories of people who lived through extraordinary times. Even without a massive battle that would see nearly 9,000 men killed and 30,000 men wounded, Gettysburg had seen suffering as the war entered its third year.

The landscape is maggoty with tales of heartache and sorrow, much as the bloody ground was maggoty in 1863 for entirely different reasons. And if you walk too far for too long across this battlefield or through this town, you will run into the ghosts of the past. This is not the hokum and humbug of the local cottage industry of ghost tours; this is finding the real people of the real past still echoing in this place. Your mind begins to paint them into the picture even without your asking.

Though it is long since demolished, the home of Jack Hopkins rises again in the imagination, a squat structure behind the imposing Pennsylvania Hall on the Gettysburg College’s campus. Hopkins was the college’s janitor. The joshing students loved their Jack, a character and fixture among the hundred or so young men who teemed across the campus when war broke out. They even called him, penned in neat letters in a yearbook, “our vice president.” A joke, of course, because the janitor could never be vice president of Pennsylvania College. A double joke because the students could never imagine an African-American man as vice president of their beloved alma mater, or anything for that matter. Hopkins’ skin became a target in the lingering months of spring 1863. As Lee’s army marched northward, they snapped up and sent south the free black population of southern Pennsylvania. Jack Hopkins and his family ran for their lives from the oncoming Confederate juggernaut and the prospect of spending a lifetime in slavery.

But it is not simply the ghosts of men like Hopkins or Baugher who haunt these fields. Other men and women linger here, impelled by the battle in their own era, but throwing stark light on its changing meanings for our eyes today.

From 1925, ghosts in white sheets march into our streets once again: the knights of the Ku Klux Klan, come to Gettysburg to rally and unite on the fields where just over 60 years before the best men of a generation of North Carolinians bashed their heads against a powerful United States army. If you squint hard enough, you can see their Model-T Fords chugging down the street into town, the words, “Klan to Gettysburg,” painted on the sides. You can also squint hard and imagine Harry Viener locking up his shop along York Street early on that Friday, heading home to celebrate Rosh Hashanah as the denizens of hate, against not only African Americans, but Jews and Catholics as well, streamed through his town’s streets.

That next day, September 19th, 1925, the streets were filled with white hoods, American flags and cheering throngs. One contingent of Klansmen stretched a flag across the street; spectators dug into their pockets and hurled dollar coins into the folds of Klan-lofted the red, white and blue to show their support. Near the edges of the crowd, some students from Gettysburg College scoffed. “Anyone who can stand by the avenue of Klan parades and watch docilely the stars and stripes used as a promiscuous coffer to catch coins,” one student later groaned, belonged, “to a land where national respect and self-respect are a grotesque hallucination.”

CC / Christopher Rice

In that field where the Klan met in 1925, just a few years later, another massive group of men and women gathered in that place again precisely because it was Gettysburg. The 75th anniversary of the battle brought thousands of veterans and their entourage to the small-but-noteworthy Pennsylvania burg. They were there to dedicate a new memorial, nestled at the crest of Oak Hill on the first day’s battlefield: the Eternal Light Peace Memorial.

But across the ocean in Europe and Asia in 1938, peace was anything but eternal. It was obvious to anyone paying attention that war had already been in progress for more than a year, with an invasion of China on one front and Hitler’s voracious hunger for Lebensraum in the other. America would need to once again defend freedom; even the most bumbling of politicians could see the pressing need.

In Gettysburg, they dedicated a monument that looked like it was ripped from Berlin’s recent Olympics, a monument to peace eternal in a land that knew quite clearly that eternal peace was not assured. President Franklin D. Roosevelt stood at a podium to accept that granite and limestone shaft topped with a gas flame, a monument atop Oak Hill where just a decade before the Klan had burned crosses in a rally of pure Americanism.

The President spoke of his own day, when, “a conflict as fundamental as Lincoln’s,” would be fought, “not with glint of steel, but with appeals to reason and justice on a thousand fronts.” In Europe, Hitler was making it quite obvious that words were not his tools of choice. And across Gettysburg College’s football field, Civil War veterans watched the latest military technology roll in a grand parade of military might and bombastic pomp. “We are near to winning this battle,” FDR told the crowd on that hill. But it would mean another 70 million open, festering graves like those that had been dug at Gettysburg to ensure a shaky peace at best.

But the stone shaft has a more important and powerful element than the flame at its top or the carved pseudo-Egyptian figures on its face. The foundation of the monument, the grading of the land it sits on, stands as a hidden monument all its own.

To plop the Eternal Light Peace Memorial on top of that hill meant grading a new roadbed, leveling off the slope and readying the plot for its new streamlined tower. And in the economic disaster that was America in the 1930s, this meant that the Civilian Conservation Corps was the prime candidate for the job.

The spirits of these workmen are just as palpable walking the fields surrounding Gettysburg, particularly near their camp at McMillian Woods along the former Confederate battle lines. Gettysburg’s CCC camp was quite unique within the service. Where other camps typically had leadership that was lilly white, regardless of the color of skin of the laborers who worked there, Gettysburg was one of only two places in America which had a CCC camp with both black labor and black leadership. The hands that leveled the ground for this new monument were black, the same color as the hands of the men and women over whose fate the Civil War had been fought.

The Civilian Conservation Corps did more than simply make room for new monuments. They made sure that the old ones survived for us to see today, perpetual landmarks on a landscape of carnage. No place is that landscape’s blood more palpable than in the National Cemetery perched atop Cemetery Hill, the key ground around which hinged the entire battle.

In the 1930s, frost and shifting earth had taken their toll, and the neat rows of adjacent headstones were a jagged and gap-toothed mess, unbecoming of a simple churchyard let alone the resting place of thousands who, “gave their lives that that nation might live.” The black workers of the Civilian Conservation Corps undertook the herculean task of hoisting each segment of headstone from its hole, regarding the ground beneath and leveling the stone once again above the sainted deads’ final repose. Black laborers who, in their work were honoring the men who in 1863 fought for the freedom of four million men and women with the same hue of skin.

It was not the first time that black labor had worked in between those neat rows of graves. The CCC laborers had the ghosts of their forbears right by their sides. As the blood was still drying on the field in the late months of summer 1863, plans were underway in town to create a cemetery to house all of the loyal sons who had died in the battle. Like all good Government contracts, the award went to the low bidder, who used local African-American men as his workmen. The black crew’s foreman Basil Biggs netted a small fortune from reburying the Federal dead through the fall and winter of 1863. For him and his fellow workers, each shovelful of dirt and rough pine box with its soldier’s identity nailed to the lid meant real, honest opportunity. These mens’ death literally offered Biggs the right to rise up the ladder of society; he went from poorer tenant farmer to honest-to-god property owner nearly overnight.

Just over the crest of the hill from where Biggs and his crew reburied the men who fell in the battle sits the town’s own burial ground, Evergreen Cemetery, from which Cemetery Hill garners its name. And in that graveyard lie the original cast of characters from the drama that was Gettysburg in the harrowing months after two armies descended on her streets.

In one neat grave is buried Michael Jacobs, mathematics and science professor at Pennsylvania College during the battle and meticulous 19th Century mind. Before Lee and Meade decided to duke it out around and through the streets of Gettysburg, Jacobs had exerted his painstaking nature to the recording of atmospheric conditions. As shots rang out in the streets, his fidelity to his thermometer was undeterred. At 2pm on July 1st, as the Eleventh Corps fought less than a mile from his house, Jacobs recorded that it was 76 degrees Fahrenheit, with cumulostratus clouds covering the whole sky. By 9pm, after the frantic retreat through town, a soft 12-mile-an-hour breeze blew from the south.

But after the battle, Jacobs set to work on another painstaking effort at recording the what and where. He became the first historian of the battle of Gettysburg, with the first published history of the sanguinary conflict. Working through J.P. Lippincott in nearby Philadelphia, the college professor was selling his history of the conflict by October of 1863, only months after rebel troops paraded in front of his home on Middle Street as they moved toward a beleaguered Federal army.

As he stood at the National Cemetery’s dedication on November 19th of that same year, Michael Jacobs’ heart must have swelled with pride as the day’s speaker, Edward Everett of Massachusetts, endorsed him and his book in his address. “The highly valuable ‘Notes’ of Professor Jacobs of the University in this place, to which I am greatly indebted,” Edward advised the crowd as he began to launch into an account of the battle, “will abundantly supply the deficiency of my necessarily too condensed statement.”

In that same cemetery where Jacobs now finds his eternal rest, another of Gettysburg’s citizens lays entombed. Under a broken gravestone, shattered and sad looking, lays the body of Frederick Huber, the promising young man who Dr. Huber and his family saw off to war, never to return. Frederick had studied at the college under Professor Jacobs. Now they lie together in the same churchyard, citizens of another, undiscovered town from whose bourn no traveller returns.

But even death could not protect the studious Huber. As he lay in eternal slumber in his grave in 1863, above his moldering face the boots of war trampled the ground. His comrades had come to his hometown; their enemies were here too. And sometime during that battle, as shot and shell plowed through the air and tore into flesh, an errant shell collided with the brittle marble of the young soldier’s gravestone. It shattered under the sheer power of that flying iron bolt.

Even in death, war is inescapable. It shapes who we truly are, who we’ve truly become and where we are truly headed. And at Gettysburg, that truth lingers around any corner you turn.

Things Never Change: Piecing Together College Life

Sometimes you stumble on something on eBay you just can't pass up. It's that $6 buy that is awkward, odd and just a little out of your scope. But it's only $6. If you'd buy a burger for $6, you shouldn't pass up an original letter from 1835.

Every letter has a story. And each of those stories has its own drama, its own meaning, its own power. The mundanities of human life can be just as powerful as the battles and charges.

In the waning days of August 1835, George Heilig set pen to paper to send a message off to his brother William. His motives were two-fold. His pastoral duty called him to let a local Gettysburgian, a man named Buehler, know that his sister-in-law was in dire straights near Norristown. A widow and her two children suffered in destitution without their husband and father. But George wasn't quite sure how to contact Buelher. "I could not for certain tell," George wrote to his brother William, "whether he was a black smith, or Dr. or Bookseller or what." William's task was simple: "see to it that he may get the letter in calling upon him & asking him whether he has rec'd an epistle from me."

But George seems to be practicing pretense; he didn't mince words to his beloved brother William. "Why don't you write to us," George pleaded to William, "as an affectionate brother who has more time to engauge in such matter than we."

William Heilig was away at college in Gettysburg, studying at the newly minted Pennsylvania College. His school wasn't north of town; it sat smack dab in Gettysburg's bustling streets at the corner of Middle and High streets. Pennsylvania Hall and the sprawling campus where decades later soldiers would suffer were all just a pipe dream of delusional Lutheran church fathers.

And like every young man far away from home, he forgot to write. "I have been looking for a letter long since but in vain," George told his brother. And news from Gettysburg back toward Philadelphia's outskirts was important to George, pastor of a congregation in Centre Square. "I'm always pleased to receive some intelligence from your place since it is the head quarters of our Lutheran Zion."

That Gettysburg was someone's Zion long before a battle was fought here is hard to imagine. Pilgrims make annual hajjes to the sacred shrines scattered across the town's fields like lost words. They genuflect at altars and offer supplication to violent and, perhaps, Christ-like sacrifices.

Before the Lutheran Theological Seminary and Lutheran College were hospitals and charnel houses, they were the heart and soul of the Lutheran church in America.

Before the violence, before the blood, before the Civil War Zion, there was the Lutheran Zion.

George Heilig walked to the post office to mail his brother the letter. He entered and paid the 12 1/2 cents to mail his letter. The clerk mentioned he had a letter for Heilig, perhaps he said it as he neatly penned the postage rate in the letter's corner. The pastor tore open his own letter, one from Mr. Buehler in Gettysburg. Enclosed was cash for the widow and her orphan children.

His pretense foiled, George asked for his letter back. He ripped open the wax seal and grabbed a pen, scribbling hurriedly. He explained that the letter was unnecessary, that the Buehler's were sound. William needn't bother the blacksmith or doctor or bookseller but to give him the family's thanks.

Then George Heilig carefully resealed the meaningless letter to his brother William and handed it back to the clerk. It traveled the long road to Gettysburg.

Perhaps George never cared about the Buehlers at all. Perhaps news from Lutheran Zion didn't matter. Perhaps he only longed to hear from William.

Perhaps we all have Williams who we long to hear from.

Child's Play: War, Toys and Avoiding the Trivial

This past weekend, I let my two hobbies combine. I spend a good chunk of my spare time doing incessant, weird and wild historical research. If you've read along on the blog for any appreciable time, you know the odd corners I've turned finding peculiar ans striking stories both here in Gettysburg and beyond.

But I have another hobby.

I am an Adult Fan of LEGO. If you spend any amount of appreciable time with me in person, you more than likely already know this too. Like HO or N scale railroaders or the folks who glue together Revell models of World War II airplanes, I obsess over tiny, realistic details rendered in a tiny artistic medium originally intended for children.

The community is chock full of geeks: engineers, computer programmers, IT professionals and (at least around DC) military wonks. I'm a lone wolf in our community. I'm an historian.

Military building has become increasingly popular over the past decade, with aftermarket parts (produced by companies like Brickarms) becoming ubiquitous, intricate plastic Panzer tanks have been rolling across bumpy plastic landscapes. Personally, I'm a purist, choosing to build only with parts produced by the LEGO company.

My good friend and fellow builder Gary proposed a wild idea: build Civil War dioramas in LEGO and display them at the Brickfair LEGO convention.

I'm not one for trivializing the realities of war. I've described some of our collective obsession with the Civil War as "torture porn" in the past.

Sometimes the displays of World War II violence at LEGO conventions bother me. Particularly, these displays seem to forget that war is a real thing. They are "drenched" in transparent-red LEGO pieces representing gallons of blood. Toy men are dismembered, tiny plastic arms posed flying through the air away from tiny plastic bodies.

But depicting war in a medium like LEGO was a fascinating prospect for me. Illustrating artistic impressions of war within an artistic medium that is principally a children's toy adds an amazingly deep layer to the possible meanings. Choosing to tell the story of this destructive war which has, at its heart, the violent ever-present American struggle over race through a toy that has one race (yellow) and perpetual smiles makes you ask, on some level, what are we teaching our children by presenting them toys with such unabashed violence? Will children mimic violence in their real life when their imagination is fed with glorious violence in toys, cartoons and other media?

So the challenge was to tell the story of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg (because it is 2013 after all) with a toy and do it both respectfully and meaningfully.

I think it happened. Our vignettes filled out the tale of the entire battle. We had the requisite amount of tiny plastic men charging across fields and up ridges. Gary built an amazing vignette where a LEGO Joshua Chamberlain defended a LEGO Little Round Top from a LEGO William C. Oates. There were a few wounded men scattered about, but no transparent-red pieces, not cartoon blood exploding out of figures' backs as artillery rounds passed through tiny plastic chest cavities. And Gary's attempt to show the struggle of war without glorifying the flowing blood paid off: participants voted it best historical themed model in the show.

My entries in our collaborative build were bent toward taking the story beyond the battlefield. A model of the Evergreen Cemetery Gatehouse told the tale of Tillie Pierce's fears returning home. Tiny LEGO figures with brown skin exhumed the body of a dead Federal soldier, Basil Biggs standing by and making sure his crew did the job right. Federal soldiers retreated through the streets of Gettysburg, careening past the Fahnestock Brothers' store.

So did it work? Were people looking at our display and thinking about war, or were they simply glorying in its mass orgasmic bloodfest?

As I sat at the table during the public days, hundreds of cameras snapped photos of Gary's Little Round Top and my model of the Lutheran Theological Seminary. They certainly were popular.

"They froze that hellscape on glass,
developed it in their
wagon-turned-laboratory and
sold the photos to America. 
Now, people at home could
finally see the true costs of war
laid bare."

But I think people could see the difference. I think our lack of toy blood, our respect and our depiction of real, sorrowful violence started gears turning. Nothing tells me that more that it was working than one overheard conversation. Two kids, both about 7 years-old or so, stopped in from of Little Round Top. One was craning his neck to see the figures and the battle between the tiny LEGO trees.

He seemed upset and said to his friend, "Why don't any of these figs have just a smiley face?"

The other 7 year-old answered quickly, almost as if the answer should be brutally obvious to his friend: "Why would they? They're fighting. They're dying. That's not fun."

No, war is not fun. War has a true cost.

And maybe, just maybe, that cost can be respectfully rendered in my favorite artistic medium.

Finding The Good: An Emotional Anniversary

I am an exacting judge of interpretive product. I realize this. My boss and I have had a few discussions about how both of our standards, sometimes, might be just a bit too high.

I still am not convinced that pure and utter excellence is not too much to ask for on every interpretive program. All too often, though, I don't find it.

When I do see amazing moments, it thrills me. I get outrageously excited. Through my entire experience as a visitor at the sesquicentennial celebration at Gettysburg, two programs stand out as verging on that sort of gleaming excellence.

The first one was on the afternoon of July 3rd. Standing at the wall, where fifteen decades before the United States was saved and slavery's ultimate demise was clinched, it would have taken effort to not offer up some meanings. They could have been rote, expected meanings. But what happened instead was something personal, something pressing beyond the simple bounds of battle mechanics and "boxes on a map."

Ranger Caitlin Kostic was offering up a moment in time. She tried to help us live as Hays' brigade, if just for a brief moment. She wasn't trying to "teach" anything. Her aim wasn't to have us walk away with knowledge, but with a feeling, a visceral moment of the fear that rippled through those men's hearts on the afternoon of July 3rd so many years before.

She helped that field sing in a way I have rarely seen displayed by LBGs, historians and rangers alike. Her short program was the embodiment of a future for military interpretation, not bogged down by excessive quotes and mechanics, but embedded in human experience and universal emotion.

By Thursday, I was spent. Monday had found me spending six solid hours leading tour groups across the campus of the College. Tuesday I wandered from site to site from noon to (literally) midnight. Then Wednesday was the sapping heat at the Angle.

But I'm a sucker for civilians. I am convinced, as I've said time and again, that the last great frontier of Gettysburg research lies in the experience of civilians and their interaction with the military landscape. So a tour focusing on the civilians, starting at the Brien Farm, was too good to pass up.

Ranger Jared Frederick led us on a short walk down the ridge line where Ijust had stood the afternoon before.

When I am on an interpretive program, my mind usually races in a continual internal monologue of, "what would I do." It can be amazingly painful when you see an interpreter tripping and missing the obvious meanings, missing the opportunities.

I leaned to a friend as Jared was speaking about the Bliss Family's farm burning on July 3rd. "That farm. The damage claim he's using covers the things you can replace, the crops, the fences, the barn. What about the family photos? The heirloom quilt?"

Then something happened that barely ever happens. Jared said nearly the same thing I had whispered. He described the Bliss' beloved collection of books and family photos, the things that when tragedy strikes can't be replaced.

My heart soared. Jared saw it. He saw where his audience could find themselves in the story, in the Bliss' experience. He put their life into terms we could understand. Not flank movements, not laundry-list damage claims, but sorrow and loss.

It happened again and again as Jared walked us down the ridge.

He let the landscape drag him around by the nose (or rather by the heart). Each place we were standing dictated the perfect story as he guided the experience. He pointed; he made sure he had things to point at. Not one of his stops felt jury rigged or awkward. Everything just fit.

Gettysburg came to life for me for a few brief moments on this most meaningful of anniversaries thanks to Caitlin and Jared. Brother and sister, you speak my mind.

To My Great Great Grand Uncle - On the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of your Death

To: My Great Great Grand Uncle

From: John

On the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of your Death

Dear William Henry,

I'm writing this standing near the spot where you died, exactly 150 years ago nearly to the second. Im typing on a tiny screen, a technological marvel that lets me share the stories of men like you with the world instantly.

They've put up a monument to you and the 17 other men who died along with you along the banks of Plum Run creek. We call this place "The Valley of Death" now. I think you among all people who have walked this green earth would understand why.

I mourn your death. I don't rightly understand why, to be honest (no offense). You've been dead a century and a half, anyone who ever loved you and hugged you and lectured you and scolded your transgressions and looked up to you as their honest son or brother is long gone.

I never knew you. And yet I mourn.

I stand in front of this cold slab of marble and bronze and I can't help but cry. I still can't tell exactly why.

God, how things have changed since you died. No, not simply since. Because you died. Men walk free because you died. Out nation is whole because you died. I can stand here and mourn you today a free man in a free nation that is always trying to extend that freedom to the darkest corners of our own nation and the globe because you died.

I wish I had known you. Not a day goes by living in this town I don't wish I could have met you. I live just up the road from where you die; your blood in this soul brought me to plant my feet here.

I am who I am because of you.

I don't know why you fought. It pains me that I don't know. Maybe it was to free 4 million men held beneath the cruel yoke of a terrible and deadly institution. You certainly grew up in a hotbed of progressive thought on who in America should be free an why we all should fight for that freedom. Maybe not.

Maybe it was because you wanted adventure. You certainly found it here, a terrible, horrific adventure from which you couldn't escape. A British author, in a children's book he wrote long after your blood mingled with this dust, wrote that, "to die will be an awfully big adventure." Maybe it was.

Maybe it was to defend your nation. You did, after all, join the U.S. Regulars, not some fly-by-night volunteer unit from Madison County. I've always thought that meant something, like you had more of a dog in this fight than just defending home or hearth. You defended that Constitution, that Declaration, that beautiful flapping flag.

I do know you wavered. I've read your private letters, and for that I apologize. Hopefully you won't mind the prying eyes of a nephew descendent glancing at your words. I know you thought about desertion in 1862.

I respect you all the more for that. Fear is natural. It's the right reaction to war. I'd be more worried if you weren't fearful, weren't scared, didn't have trepidations.

The flag I put on your monument on Memorial Day is gone, someone plucked it from its perch here. Memorial Day is the day we've set aside to honor you and all the other sainted dead who have died defending our nation.

I forgot to get a new one at the store, so I visit flag-less today. I hope you don't mind. I'm here. I hope that's enough. It's beginning to rain, big salty drops on the screen of my phone and I don't think they're coming from the clouds, but they're making it very hard to type.

So I will close for now, thanking you for everything you gave that this nation might live.

Your nephew,
John

Just Fields: 30 June 1863

Just a field; just a fence.

South of Gettysburg as midnight chimed on June 30th and the calendar flipped over to July, a quiet peach orchard sat at the corner of a narrow lane and the road to Emmitsburg. It was just a peach orchard.

Across the road from that orchard, a large wooden barn stood stocked with hay, wheat and other precious agricultural products from the fields of the Sherfy family. It was a sturdy barn, built to last decades. It was just a barn.

Down that narrow lane, John Rose's wheatfield swayed in time as wind gusted by, the small kernels the fruits of a farmer's hard labor. It was just a wheatfield.

In town, in the darkened streets after the streetlights were extinguished, shutters hung on a massive brick house on the square and cast shadows of stark lines across the red bricks as the Wills family slept inside. It was just a house.

North of the square, students doused their lamps and pulled their covers over their tired frames, a hard Tuesday's work done with more classes, worship and studying to look forward to on Wednesday morning. It was just another Wednesday.

The night dissolved into morning. Light peaked over the eastern horizon and cast a hazy glow through thick clouds on the town. When daybreak came that morning of July 1st, Gettysburg was just a town.

Nothing more.

There is Still Time: Contingency And History

...and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave...

This *did not* air on WGAL in June of 1863,
for obvious reasons.

William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust has that beautifully evocative passage that anyone worth their salt contemplating a Pickett's Charge program has considered including in their ebb and flow. Faulkner was a master of language, and his passage about, "every Southern boy fourteen years old," is a particularly artful.

But it points to a particular ability of the child's brain that we seem to lose as we grow. The past is mailable in our minds when we are young. It might be because our imagination is so powerful as children. A stick can become a Springfield Rifle, a pile of branches against a tree trunk can become a fortress, a gust of wind can become a charging line of rebel infantry.

So what happens when we get older? Does our imagination fall to pieces?

We stand at the crossroads of war in late June, 2013, looking backwards 150 years and knowing the outcome. We know that battle is coming to Gettysburg. We know that 50,000 men will be killed, wounded or go missing over the course of three bloody days. We know how the story ends, we've read the last page of the book.

Which is a dangerous place to start from.

The men who splashed across the Potomac into Maryland in June of 1863 didn't know they were headed to Gettysburg. They didn't know they'd repel Confederate forces in a wheatfield, or rampage across some farmer's peach orchard on their way to slaughter Federal infantry. They knew battle might come, but when and where, even if, was up in the air.

John T. McIlhenny didn't know a battle
was coming. Otherwise, why even bother
laying out July 2nd's newspaper?

A battle at Gettysburg was not a foregone conclusion on June 25th, 1863. The Star and Banner boasted in its folds that, "This giving too much credence to mere rumor has done a great deal of mischief." Gettysburg was scared, but it was far from predestined a battle would come to its streets.

Nor was it foreordained on June 26th, when students of Pennsylvania College were stampeded from fields west of their alma mater back to the safety of Harrisburg.

June 27th or 28th or 29th? Still not destined. And the people of Gettysburg thought the worst was over. "Although the rebels have come and gone, (so far as our town is concerned,) we may expect to hear all sorts of rumors," the Star and Banner wrote in it's doomed July 2nd edition, "The big fright seems to be over, but it is natural to expect many little ones to follow." Gettysburg expected to see a few rebel stragglers, but the citizens were cautioned not to, "magnify every little squad into a regiment," and sound a needless alarm.

And on June 30th, with troops looming in the Cashtown Gap and cavalry swarming into Adams County? Sure, it looks like it's all planned ahead of time, but even on the eve of battle, there's nothing certain.

Gettysburg didn't have to happen like it did. It didn't have to happen at all. It wasn't advertised. It was a relative surprise.

That doesn't change the fact that it did happen. But it needs to color how we envision the campaign. These armies weren't heading toward Gettysburg. They would simply end up there by chance, happenstance and the eventuality of war.

Stormclouds Gather on the Horizon

The first few stanzas of a poem by Howard Glyndon from the folds of The Lutheran and Missionary from late August of 1863:

The days of June were nearly done;
The fields, with plenty overrun,
Were ripening 'neath the harvest sun
In fruitful Pennsylvania!

Sang birds and children — "All is well!"
When sudden, over hill and deil,
The gloom of coming battle fell,
On Peaceful Pennsylvania!

Through Maryland's historic land,
With boastful tongue and spoiling hand,
They burst—a fierce and famished band,
Right into Pennsylvania!

In Cumberland's romantic vale
Was heard the plundered farmer's wail;
And every mother's cheek was pale,
In blooming Pennsylvania!

With taunt and jeer; and shout and song:
Through rustic towns, they passed along—
A confident and braggart throng—
Through frightened Pennsylvania.

George C. Wallace: Schoolhouse Door to Gettysburg

George Wallace as he appeared on the
Huntley-Brinkley Report in 1963.

In the days after his famed stand in the schoolhouse door, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace attended to the business at hand on his desk in Montgomery. Wallace served as chief executive in an office in the first home of the Confederacy. One of the things awaiting Wallace on his return from Tuscaloosa was a letter from Paul L. Roy of Gettysburg.

Roy was editor of the Gettysburg Times, and was endeavoring to get letters from each governor sending their tidings of goodwill to Gettysburg on the hundredth anniversary of the momentous battle. The idea was pure. And most governors responded with purity.

Governor Endicott Peabody of Massachusetts wrote to Paul about how, "All Americans look to the green meadows of a peaceful Gettysburg today and pray for the continued and strengthened union of all the states." Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton chimed in, noting that, "Our American family is the family of mankind, and our neighbors are our brothers, whatever race or accent. Those who fought at Gettysburg waged their lives in a bloody tenant of this democratic maxim. It prevailed, and America has grown great under its guidance."

In Montgomery, George Wallace prepared to write his own letter. In Tuscaloosa, he had just made a potent statement about his vision for America. "The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the Central Government," Wallace read to a crowd gathered in front of the University's auditorium, "offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this State by officers of the Federal Government."

In his own letter, Texas Governor John Connally wrote to Editor Roy that, "Today we live in a changing world which generates perplexing problems. We must not condemn these changes, nor attempt to still the hands of the clock."

On televisions around the country, Americans were still watching Governor Wallace speak his words in the schoolhouse door. "My action," he told the nation through the sleek television microphone hanging from his neck, "seeks to avoid having state sovereignty sacrificed on the altar of political expediency." Americans were hearing the rhythmic harping of Wallace against, "the might of the Central Government," and, "unwarranted actions of the Central Government," and, "illegal usurpation of power by the Central Government."

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus wrote to Editor Roy before Wallace made his stand, before Kennedy made his speech that same night, before Medgar Evers lay in a pool of blood in his driveway just a couple hours later. But his state had known strife over school integration as well. "I think it is also an appropriate time to re-dedicate ourselves," he assured the editor and his readers, "to those principles of freedom and democracy which Abraham Lincoln so aptly expressed in his now famous and immortal Gettysburg Address." If America was to deal with the real enemy, the world's, "external dissension," it would mean quitting petty squabbles and realizing together that , "we must remain united if we are to endure as a nation."

Letterhead for the State of Alabama rolled through a typewriter in Governor Wallace's office. Hammered out on that 26-key-piano was a familiar tune.

"We must do our part to see that we remain a nation united in peace, retaining individual rights and liberties." Individual liberties, that was, save for those of Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood when they wanted to register as students at the University of Alabama. "Individual liberties must be safeguarded, for without freedom and liberty for each of us, we are traveling down the dead-end road of destructive centralization."

Wallace made a second stand in June of 1963, this time in the pages of the Gettysburg Times. And it wouldn't only be in the folds of the newspaper that Wallace would make his stand. The Governor had plans to make a special trip to Pennsylvania the first week of July.

In the Times' press room in the borough, Governor George C. Wallace's words rolled off the line inside the newspaper's anniversary edition. There his words were printed for all to read in stark lines of black and white, much like the nation that his words envisioned.