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REVISITING THE HAUNTED HISTORY OF GETTYSBURG

AMERICAN GHOSTS | October 17th 2008

Gettysburg was the blood-drenched turning point of the American civil war. And as soon as it was over, another battle began--over how it would be remembered and mythologised. Stephen Budiansky keeps going back to the battlefield...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

America's restless reinvention, even more than its newness, leaves little room for ghosts. I once tried to retrace Henry David Thoreau's footsteps around New England and found myself spending a lot of time contemplating parking lots and 200,000-square-foot discount stores. Even recent history in America has a way of feeling not just long ago but far away, as if it took place somewhere else entirely. American landscapes seem either timeless or created yesterday.

But I've been to a couple of places where the past was suddenly near, hauntingly palpable. I remember one windswept winter's day south of Albuquerque, where I stood by myself in the roofless stone shell of an ill-fated 17th-century Franciscan mission, the only soul for miles around. Built at God knows what human cost by forcibly Christianised Pueblo Indians to re-create a Spanish priest's memories of the churches of his homeland, the Concepción de Quarai was abandoned within just a few years of its completion; famine, pestilence and Apache attacks decimated conquered and conqueror alike. As dried leaves rattled across the nave's flagstones, said to cover the remains of friars who had lived so briefly so long ago in this achingly lonesome New Mexico desert, the intervening centuries were annihilated in a way that suddenly became too close for comfort. I remember getting out of there in a hurry.

The only other places where I've ever felt something similar in America haven't even had the eerie benefit of solitude or a romantic air of abandonment going for them. The fields on which America's great civil-war battles were fought have been the targets of commercial tourism almost from the moments the battles were over. Gettysburg, where the most important clash of the war took place during three sweltering days in July 1863, has lived off tourism ever since; today it receives 2m visitors a year; the roads through the "military park" are crowded on any day of the year with bumper-to-bumper tour buses. The town itself, coming up to the very edge of the battlefield, is jammed with tacky shops hawking souvenir glasses, relics of varying degrees of authenticity, and "genuine" reproduction clothing for the fanatical re-enactors who every weekend are to be found on some civil-war battlefield playing soldier. There's a wax museum, a purveyor of "ghost tours", a toy-train display with an actor dressed up as Abraham Lincoln, "The World's Most Humongous Teddy Bear Store", and "General Pickett's All-U-Can-Eat Buffet Restaurant", which stands not far from the scene of his namesake's famous failed charge against Union cannon: 15,000 Confederates advanced across three-quarters of a mile of open field, and in half an hour 10,000 were killed or wounded, making Pickett's name ever after synonymous with the expenditure of futile courage.

And yet if any place in America feels haunted, Gettysburg does. The National Park Service, which took over the battlefield in 1933, has gone to great lengths to try to restore the appearance of the 6,000 acres it maintains to its 1863 condition. It has rebuilt rail fences, planted cornfields, and bought out as many of the nearby touristy intrusions as it can. The most famous of these was a massive eyesore: a 307-foot-tall, battleship-grey "observation tower" built on private land abutting the battlefield. After years of sparring with its owners, the park finally secured a court order forcing its sale to the government, and on the 137th anniversary of the battle, with unconcealed glee, they blew it up.

Just this year, the park service opened a huge yet ever so discreetly concealed new visitor centre, tucked away in newly planted woods, to replace the modernist 1960s building that stood smack on top of the Union positions on Cemetery Ridge. And it currently has elaborate plans to remove about 500 acres of woodland that were open field at the time of the battle, to restore another 300 acres of woods, thickets and orchards that have meanwhile vanished, and to construct 39 miles of historically accurate fences and hedgerows.

Despite this striving for authenticity by the park service and the huckstering commercialism of the town, Gettysburg feels--to use an overworked yet inescapably apt phrase--like hallowed ground. "The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here," Lincoln said in his famous address dedicating the cemetery for Union dead four months after the battle, "but it can never forget what they did here."

He was wrong, though: what was said, then and since, has much to do with the power the place holds. For what really haunts Gettysburg is a veritable army of monuments, 1,328 in all, that stand sentry over every yard of the battlefield, marking the exact spots where every state's regiments stood and died. Gettysburg is haunted by this struggle for memory by the survivors of the event as much as by the event itself.

The monuments are a cacophony of styles: bronze tablets, equestrian statues, pyramids of cannon balls, regimental emblems, histrionically or stoically dying soldiers, draped allegorical figures, Greek temples; some understated, some Victorian extravagances; some dignified, some tear-jerkingly maudlin. They are all so intrusive and bizarre, so opposed to any conventional notions of historic preservation, that they fight against the park's stated goal of letting visitors imagine the scene as it was in 1863.

They are inescapable, though; the product of the imperative urge of the battle's survivors to give lasting substance to an overwhelming but transient experience. Five times as many Americans died at Gettysburg as on D-Day in the second world war. To the generation that survived, it was the defining event of their lives, seared for ever into their souls. Decades later, Oliver Wendell Holmes junior, thrice wounded in the war and a justice of the United States Supreme Court, would write, "We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt-we still feel-the passion of life to its top."

Present-day fascination with the civil war has its geeky, creepily obsessive side. Tony Horwitz, in his book "Confederates in the Attic", told of one re-enactor whose speciality was imitating bloated corpses on the battlefield. Another took authenticity so far as to piss in his pants, since that's what real civil-war soldiers did in battle. A couple of years ago, while visiting a small museum in Frederick, Maryland, devoted to civil-war medicine, I was bemused to find in the gift shop a scrupulous reproduction of a civil-war surgeon's kit, complete with amputation saws. Entire factories apparently crank out this stuff, and there's a great deal of one-upmanship among re-enactors over who has the most authentic gear. They also get so emotionally involved in their play-acting that it can border on the delusional. A friend of mine chatting to some re-enactors in Mississippi after a replay of the battle of Vicksburg was astonished when one middle-aged man in Confederate uniform suddenly burst into tears. "I didn't want to surrender!" he blubbered by way of explanation.

I've never felt any of those pulls, but since visiting Gettysburg on a blustery day 25 years ago I've been back many times, and to other civil-war battlefields, sucked in despite myself, drawn by the land and the memories that haunt it. I've walked through the cotton fields at Stones River in Tennessee, where a quarter of the 80,000 men who fought were killed or wounded; I have ridden my horse along the quiet woods of Manassas in Virginia, where General James Longstreet, the most brilliant commander of the Confederacy, wheeled 30,000 men to the left in 30 minutes to save the day (the same Longstreet who would later be reviled throughout the South for accepting defeat and defending the rights of the freed slaves); I've wound through the steep terrain of Vicksburg on a sweltering tropical day, and climbed the steps up to the crazy replica of the Parthenon erected by the state of Illinois to commemorate Ulysses S. Grant's costly triumph there--he secured control of the Mississippi, dividing the Confederacy troops in two, just a day after the Union victory at Gettysburg.

But Gettysburg was and is the most famous battle of the war, one neither side had planned. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had invaded Pennsylvania, hoping to demoralise the North and secure diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy by Europe. A small, prosperous market town 75 miles north of Washington, Gettysburg was unimportant in itself. But from it a dozen roads radiated to every point of the compass, so when initial skirmishes began here between opposing cavalry forces on July 1st, the two vast armies that were spread across the region were able to converge quickly from all directions. The Union troops got there first and were able to consolidate their position on Cemetery Ridge, a long-spined hill running south from the town.

Lee's generals tried in vain to dissuade him from making a frontal assault against them. Longstreet, his most trusted lieutenant, wanted to make a move towards Washington, so that the Northern troops would have to abandon their advantage of the high ground in order to protect the capital. But Lee was adamant. "The enemy is there," he said, pointing to the hill, "and I am going to attack him there." And so began three days of gruelling slaughter for 165,000 soldiers.

When it was over, 50,000 had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner; Lee was retreating back to Virginia; British and French moves to recognise the Confederacy evaporated; and what Southern romantics would call the "high-water mark" of the Confederacy had crested and passed.

The urge to commemorate the ground began even before the dead were buried, and the monuments erected by individual units and states quickly became the focus of pilgrimage. Veterans came back and dutifully bought souvenir copies of the monuments to take home with them. By the 1890s Gettysburg had the largest outdoor collection of bronze and marble statuary in the world.

Without them, Gettysburg would today strike the unprimed visitor as little more than a pretty 19th-century farming museum. But the monuments were what stunned me on that first visit, and have every time since; I felt that I was constantly accompanied by those men who laboriously laid claim to every inch of ground. That army of bronze and stone brought home what the fight had meant for those who were there: the "incommunicable experience of war".

Some of the monuments are little more than laconic lists of inconceivable statistics:

COMBATANTS ~ 393
KILLED IN ACTION/DIED OF WOUNDS ~ 110
WOUNDED/WOUNDED CAPTURED ~ 193
CAPTURED UNWOUNDED ~ 37
NON-CASUALTY ~ 53

At the place where the 1st Minnesota regiment saved the centre of the Union line on July 2nd with a suicidal charge, stands one of the more eloquent memorials: a single soldier leaning?forward, rifle in hand. Nearby, a frieze portraying the final? moments of Pickett's charge the next day, at a spot where Union batteries fired relentlessly to hold the ridge, is accompanied by the terse inscription, "Double canister at ten yards".

Others are just odd. A bronze wigwam symbolises New York's Tammany regiment. A rifle-shot away, a huge domed arch erected by the state of Pennsylvania honours the troops who defended their native soil. A twisting spiral staircase to the dome (surmounted by a Winged Victory) leads out to an observation deck that surveys all of Cemetery Ridge. This extravaganza cost Pennsylvania a quarter of a million dollars, big money a century ago. It's pompous and absurd, a ridiculous failure in one sense but movingly earnest in another; a sort of inarticulate hope that 3,840 tons of concrete, iron and granite could somehow express the vastness of what happened here.

The ex-Confederate states, impoverished and reluctant to lavish much attention on the site of one of their great defeats, and unwelcomed at first by Union veterans groups, were late in adding their own memorials. But by the first years of the 20th century they were outdoing the Yankees. At the scene of the furthest advance of Pickett's men a huge bronze tablet in the form of a book, opened at a page titled "High Water Mark", was put up.

Many of the subsequent Confederate monuments began to reflect the Southern party line that became known as the "lost cause". This romanticised Southern heroism, suggested that the South was the real moral victor, and carefully avoided any mention of slavery as a cause of the war.

The tension in this war of competing memories is largely played out behind the scenes, though. There was a spate of vandalism at Vicksburg a few years ago but it turned out to be non-ideological; the culprit, eventually caught, had been spray painting "Jesus is Coming, Repent Y'all" on the memorials. It is more through what isn't said that the fight for meaning has taken place. Confederate dissenters from the "lost cause" mythology, such as Longstreet, were simply banished from the pantheon: no statue of Longstreet existed anywhere until 1998,when some North Carolina descendants of Confederate veterans finally succeeded in raising funds for one (many of the contributions came from the North). I found Longstreet in a pretty grove just off the road that follows the Confederate lines; a bright orange northern oriole and I shared a quiet moment there. In a touch that humanises him, the statue--depicting him on horseback--stands on the bare ground rather than high on a pedestal.

There was a tendency for the North, too, to want to forget that the civil war was about slavery, and it's only in recent years that the park service has tried to step back from the single-minded focus on strategy and tactics and battle and heroes. The new museum devotes only a third of its space to the battle and the rest to previously missing "historical context", including the voices of slavery. Predictably, some Southern "heritage" groups have complained and want a return to the battle-and-heroes formula.

They can probably save their breath. As well-meaning as the park service has been, and as tasteful as the new visitor centre has turned out--all stone and beams and echoes of vernacular Pennsylvania farm architecture--its interior struck me as about as welcoming as an airport terminal, and the museum is a polished labyrinth that holds little charm and casts no spells. It's the amateurish, campy, chaotic, abbreviated, oddly authentic voices of the monuments outside--the voices of those struggling to make sense of the enormity--that still speak the loudest.

Occasionally they manage even to speak of larger things. Standing on top of a small outlying hill called Little Round Top, which anchored the south end of the Union line, I found it harder this time than 25 years ago to conjure up a picture of the battle that spread across its rocky slopes. The drone of idling diesel engines from a phalanx of tour buses worked to exorcise the ghosts. But it was here that a desperate stand by a single Union brigade, arriving in double time at the disastrously exposed hill just ten minutes before Longstreet's advancing Confederates would have taken it, prevented the collapse of the entire Union position. I could remember, though, the almost palpable sense of exposed vulnerability that the place had on that blustery and mercifully lonely day of my first visit, and the vivid vision I'd had of a screaming line of ragtag Texans and Alabamians charging up the field of huge scattered boulders towards me.

Since then Little Round Top has become the most visited spot in the park, a result almost entirely of the 1993 film "Gettysburg", which made much (some historians grouse too much) of Joshua Chamberlain, played by Jeff Daniels. Chamberlain was a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College who won the Medal of Honour for leading the 20th Maine regiment that day. Having fought off two charges by the Alabama troops in 90 minutes of desperate fighting, and with nearly half his men dead or wounded and ammunition low, Chamberlain gave the order "Bayonets!", led his surviving men downhill, and routed the exhausted rebels.

But Hollywood hype or no, the words Chamberlain spoke in 1889 at the dedication of the austere 20th Maine monument, which lies in the woods below the hilltop, were as haunting as any ever uttered about the place. "On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger...And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of...shall come to this deathless field...and the power of the vision pass into their souls."

And somehow, against the odds, it does.

Picture credit: fauxto_digit/flickr, Marion Doss/flickr, adamr.stone/flickr

(Stephen Budiansky has written 12 books, most recently "The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appamattox". He lives in Virginia and is a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly.)