I spent the weekend on a site of carnage, a place where over 50,000 people were killed wounded, or went missing over three days in 1863. It was cousins’ weekend. It is an event that happens once a year where my wife and her cousins, husbands, and friends get together for food and drinks and random mayhem in some small town within driving distance.
I’ve been to Gettysburg three or four times in my life, the last was about 14 years ago when we took the kids to wear themselves out climbing the rocks of Devil’s Den and running the slopes of Pickett’s Charge.
Back then, confederate flags were crossed with Old Glory in front of every tourist shop and museum in town.
The Rebel flag has now disappeared with the exception, oddly enough, of the National Park itself which still has the stars and bars in various places. I guess the 80,000-strong Army of Northern Virginia can’t be completely disappeared by modern revisionist history.
The narrative has changed a bit. It used to be “brother fighting brother in brave combat suffering horrific losses on both sides…”
Now it’s “the poor farmers of southern Pennsylvania were invaded by the Rebel army who proceeded to burn farms and steal livestock…”
It should be noted that in terms of invading armies, the Army of Northern Virginia was on the tame side as General Lee wanted to gain sympathy from the people of Maryland, as well as in England and France.
So it was that only one civilian died in the Battle of Gettysburg. A random bullet killed Jennie Wade as she kneaded bread in her kitchen. She has a museum, of course, Gettysburg being a tourist town. Apparently, you can still see the bullet hole in the kitchen door. The price was $13.50 for adults. We passed.
The group took a carriage ride instead where the driver told us that during the recent building of the middle school, workers made a gruesome discovery while laying out the football field.
The backhoe unearthed thousands of arms and legs. During and after the battle, doctors would amputate limbs as fast as they could wield a bone saw as this was the only cure for a mini-ball that shattered the bones of the wounded. Amputees had an 80% survival rate, if you can believe a man who named his horse Huckleberry.
Juneteenth National Independence Day
Tomorrow we celebrate the national holiday of Juneteenth. According to Wiki, it celebrates “June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War. Early celebrations date back to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. They spread across the South amongst newly freed African American slaves and their descendants and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. Participants in the Great Migration brought these celebrations to the rest of the country.”
A few months after the Battle of Gettysburg Abraham Lincoln gave a speech. Here it is in its entirety delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
–Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863.
Happy Juneteenth,
Christian DeHaemer
Outsiderclub.com
What I’m reading:
https://www.history.com/news/
https://www.battlefields.org/
https://www.outsiderclub.com/
