I have been to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania many times in my life, but those times are divided between my childhood and my adulthood. The latter period includes two visits, the first of which was in the summer of 2017. The second one was this week, on Monday.
The circumstances that led us here were, to us, as meaningful as the solemn visit to the park—reconnection with close family after more than three years of separation. The day before we returned to the Northwest, we drove into Pennsylvania from Maryland with a plan to visit the Amish country and spend the day. Our adult daughter, who has been to Gettysburg twice, suggested that we detour to the park and with no objections, we took the turnoff to visit the battleground.
As a boy, I lived not far from Gettysburg and my love of history has its roots in spending time here. But I confess that boyhood fascination, while an important spark for me, did not contain the emotion that it is to be here now and feel the presence, be haunted by the ghosts. From the open field where Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble charged across low, open ground, and their men were mowed down by Union troops, to the spot where President Lincoln stood in what is now the National Cemetery to deliver his address four months after the battle, the sacred ground seems more sacred, somehow. It feels more appropriate to be here, talking quietly in the cold air as sad, silvered clouds trail the blue sky, and the wind blows through bare January trees.
For these people, for these soldiers, they were led here to these green and rolling fields, this bucolic place where over the course of three days in July, 1863, there were between 46,000 and 51,000 casualties. These numbers are impossible, and even now, we don’t have an exact count. War is an impossible conclusion—the willful surrender of liberty to defend liberty. For the Confederacy, a defense of the worst kind—an argument that their freedom depended on the slavery of others.
Gettysburg is an impossible place. The ghosts appear even to unbelievers. Death and pride coexist together, and a kind of awed reverence that pervades as you walk here and see it is disturbed only by the small but persistent feeling of the absurdity of this fight. The graves here, the cemetery, deserve nothing less than your total and unflagging respect. Even the Confederate dead deserve that quiet reflection. They gave all, and it is not for you now to question their particular and peculiar sacrifice. For they are answering to their God now, and are beyond your judgment.
And still today — the town center, the place where daily life goes on, is a pretty picture of what an American town is. To photograph downtown Gettysburg is to photograph America. Yet one gets the sense that everyone who lives and works here knows exactly where they are, knows the price paid in blood here, and they both honor that, and live in a kind of fear of it. Gettysburg is not raucous. Commerce is brisk, like in so many American towns. And people live their lives, doing what they want to do — but doing it in the shadow of the very tension that America has lived with since its founding, and in some ways, still lives with today.
Nighttime in Gettysburg must be astounding. I’ve been coming here since the 1970s, but I’ve never spent the night. Cemetery Ridge, the high ground and “the middle” that the Union held as General Lee sent Pickett’s men to their deaths across the field below looks directly over the town as well. As I wander the road, walking on the worn and spare winter grass, I imagine night along this road. Does General Hancock call out to his troops to steady until the Rebs get closer? Do the screams of the dead and dying overwhelm? Or maybe it’s just that thin veneer separating the living and the dead that gets thinner at night, like the Celts believed. Or maybe it is the quiet of the National Cemetery just above, and the stone walkway to the very spot where the most extraordinary president, a most ordinary man, gave a two-minute speech that became as important as the Declaration of Independence that inspired it — just so.
We are all orphans of Gettysburg. We are all children of these parents who fought and died here, and the man who tried to make sense of it with his words here that grew larger from the moment he said them four months after the battle. But that is no matter.
I have come to accept the terrible tension that is Gettysburg. I have fallen in love with the small town and its people, its celebration of a kind of Americana that exists in visions of 4th of July parades, and snowy Christmas eve services in the church. I have nightmares of the sheeted dead awakening their dire warning of what happened here. And I’m not just a little obsessed with this small piece of my former home state, where this impossible town gets up every morning and invites all of us in to share in its brutal past and its soft winter sunsets that open an uncertain future.
Gettysburg was the crossroads of a war that nearly destroyed us in the 19th century—and it is the crossroads now of understanding just who we think we are.