Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [1]
In 1896 the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that has stood for more than a century as a landmark in the struggle for historic preservation of hallowed ground. Not surprisingly that decision grew out of events surrounding the recent creation of Gettysburg National Military Park. The Gettysburg Electric Railway Company had built a trolley line over the southern part of the battlefield to carry tourists to Devil's Den and the Round Tops. The park wanted to buy the land and restore it to its 1863 appearance, which of course would mean removal of the trolley line. The company refused to sell. The government began proceedings to seize the land under the power of eminent domain. The case went to the Supreme Court, where the government argued that “the ground whereon great conflicts have taken place, especially those where great interests or principles were at stake, becomes at once of so much public interest that its preservation is essentially a matter of public concern.” Nowhere were such great principles at stake more than at Gettysburg, which embodied “the national idea and the principle of the indissolubility of the Union.”
The Court agreed. The justices ruled unanimously that Gettysburg was vested with such importance for the fate of the United States that the government had the right to “take possession of the field of battle, in the name and for the benefit of all the citizens of the country.… Such a use seems… so closely connected with the welfare of the republic itself as to be within the powers granted Congress by the Constitution for the purpose of protecting and preserving the whole country.”
The battle of Gettysburg was an event without equal in its connection “with the welfare of the republic itself,” as the Court put it. But what is Gettysburg as a place? It is a battlefield of about ten square miles (five miles from north to south and two miles from east to west, not counting East Cavalry Field) surrounding a county-seat town of about eight thousand people today, 2,400 at the time of the battle in 1863. It is located seventy-five miles north of Washington, 115 miles west of Philadelphia, and only eight miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, which forms the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. From the town of Gettysburg a dozen historic (and modern) roads radiate to every point of the compass—a major reason why a great battle was fought there, for the road network enabled the armies to concentrate there quickly after the opening clashes.
Although it is the home of Gettysburg College and of a Lutheran theological seminary, the main business of Gettysburg today is tourism. Most of those nearly two million visitors to the battlefield spend money in town. Many tourist services flourish, from restaurants and motels to shops selling every kind of trinket and relic, from “ghost tours” and a wax museum to bookstores and picture galleries. Some of these businesses are cheek by jowl with the National Military Park, which includes more than four thousand acres on which most of the fighting took place during those first three days of July 1863.
No tourists came to Gettysburg before that time. It was then a market town for a large and prosperous agricultural hinterland. The area was a famous fruitgrowing region; no fewer than thirty-eight orchards existed on what became the battlefield. All of them are gone today except part of the famous Peach Orchard where the Confederates broke Dan Sickles's line on July 2, plus two ornamental fruit orchards on Cemetery Hill and at the site of the Bliss farm, across which some of the Pickett-Pettigrew attackers marched on July 3. The Park Service has long-term plans to plant replica orchards where they existed in 1863—but don't hold your