A Minor Civilian Among the Major Generals

Chris O'Carroll

It’s a cloudless, mercilessly bright day in mid July, and my wife and I are standing atop Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg National Military Park, just a few miles north of the Mason-Dixon line. Seven score years and a couple of weeks ago, our fathers brought forth on this Pennsylvania battlefield some 51,000 casualties, including more than 7,700 deaths. There were three days of fighting at Gettysburg in 1863, so on a per diem basis this was a less lethal engagement than, say, Antietam, but the Union and Confederate troops who clashed here contributed generously to the body count of this nation’s bloodiest war.

A German exchange student who lived with our family some years ago was astounded to hear that more Americans died in the Civil War than in either of the 20th century’s World Wars. He was a smart kid who knew that the bloodthirsty ingenuity of our species never rests and that the mass murder technology of the 1860s was puny stuff compared with the weaponry of subsequent generations. He caught on right away when I reminded him that the War Between the States featured Americans fighting and dying on both sides. We’re pretty good at killing foreigners, but we’re real good at killing each other.

The climax of the carnage at Gettysburg was the suicidal blunder known to history as “Pickett’s Charge,” although some of the memorials at Gettysburg refer to it as “Longstreet’s Assault.” Major General George Pickett was one of three sub-commanders leading the charge under the direction of Lieutenant General James Longstreet (himself serving under Private First Class General Robert E. Lee). Together with Generals Isaac Trimble and J. Johnston Pettigrew, Pickett led 12,000 Southern troops on a doomed attack across three quarters of a mile of open ground toward the Northern guns. But just try starting a conversation about the Pickett, Trimble & Pettigrew charge. People will think you’re talking about a law firm.

There are maybe seventy score battlefield memorials at Gettysburg - stones and plaques marking the positions of units that fought here, conventional statues of soldiers and horses, elaborate shrines that resemble miniature temples, even a few monuments erected by Southern states to trumpet the righteousness of the Confederate cause. Over here on the Union side of the field, our walk from the parking lot to the top of Cemetery Ridge was a stroll through a rather monotonous, one-note sculpture garden. Not that I’m complaining. Had we heard a sudden outbreak of gunfire, we would have had no shortage of stone and bronze shields to hide behind.

We’ve emerged on the crest of the ridge right around the midpoint, so we’re standing more or less where the battle was decided. Pickett and the rest of the law firm set out from Seminary Ridge (we can see it there to the west, across the valley) with the aim of breaking through and splitting the Union line. The bloodied remnants of the Southern force did in fact briefly penetrate the Northern defenses here, so this stretch of ridge is dense with monuments and interpretive markers commemorating the hand-to-hand fighting the ran up the death toll a bit more before the overmatched attackers made their retreat. The Army of Northern Virginia spent only about an hour charging toward the cannons and rifles of the Army of the Potomac; we devote somewhat more time than that to reading inscriptions, pacing the stretches of contested ground, and occasionally eavesdropping on other people’s tour guides. The famous Mathew Brady/Timothy O’Sullivan photos of Gettysburg corpses bloating in the July sun keep intruding on my consciousness, messing with my appreciation of the grandeur of it all. A Confederate survivor said of the charge, “We gained nothing but glory,” an assessment that is entirely true up until the last two words, and entirely insane thereafter.

My wife is taking this better than I am. A professional historian who doesn’t let herself get all mushy and sentimental about the atrocities on humanity’s ancestral rap sheet, she’s leaving me to my dim, weepy reflections while she concentrates on getting down all the facts and compiling a mental list of the books, videos, and other materials she wants to pick up at the gift shop and incorporate into her classroom lectures. Even though military history is not her area of specialization, she’s aware that you can’t teach a decent American history survey course without knowing your way around the Civil War. Although primarily interested in the social and cultural history of the era - women’s lives on the home front, families divided by the secession conflict - she’s realistic about what material she has to cover to give her students a complete picture of the war years, and she’s not shrinking from the ghastlier details. She’s beautiful to behold when she gets into this hardheaded, Jesse Ventura, ain’t-got-time-to-bleed mode.

When we finally make our way to the gift shop, one of the videos we select features footage from a 75th anniversary gathering at the battle site in 1938. White-haired Northern and Southern veterans shaking hands at spots where once upon a time they had shed each other’s blood. It’s all very uplifting, I know. A nation reconciled and reunited. But when do you suppose we might figure out a way to fast-forward to the fraternal handshakes and skip the enthusiastic killing sprees? I respond much the same way to those wartime Christmas stories about enemy soldiers emerging from their trenches to play games, exchange gifts, and sing holiday songs together. It’s supposed to twang my heartstrings that we can put aside our guns once a year to embrace our common humanity. But I keep spoiling the celebration by noticing the other 364 days on the calendar. After those aberrant intervals of peace and fellowship, we’re always happy to resume the business of mutual slaughter. Surely that knocks a few points off our what-a-piece-of-work-is-man score.

If my rose-colored glasses were half full, I might be cheered by the mix of Northern and Southern license plates in the various Gettysburg parking lots. At a site that reminds us how fiercely we’re capable of hating one another, we seem to have discovered an ability to mingle without violent incident. Then as my wife and I are leaving the gift shop and crossing a street to enter the graveyard where Abraham Lincoln delivered his much noted and long remembered speech, a pickup truck straight out of a honky-tonk song comes roaring in our direction. Two Confederate battle flags, one on either side of the cab, whip in the breeze as the driver declines to stop for pedestrians. We stay well out of the way as the truck tears through the crosswalk and recedes in its cloud of reckless Rebel attitude. Pickup’s Charge.

Chris O'Carroll