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By Root 276 0

a while and proceed south along Seminary Ridge on the park road called West Confederate Avenue, which follows part of the Confederate line of July 2 and 3. Along the way we will see many cannons and monuments of various kinds—as indeed we have been seeing since the beginning of our tour. The numbers of monuments and cannons and other physical artifacts of the battle and its commemoration are far greater than at any other battlefield. There are something like 1,400 monuments and markers of various sorts, and almost four hundred cannons. The carriages of the latter are replicas, but most of the guns themselves actually date from the war, and some of them were at Gettysburg in 1863. They are placed today in the approximate position where they, or ones like them, fought during the battle (there were more than four hundred cannons with the two armies at Gettysburg).

About a hundred battery markers today indicate the principal locations of each six- or four-gun artillery battery during the battle. Other official bronze markers (placed by the War Department a century ago, when it administered the battlefield) stand where each of the seventy Union and fifty-six Confederate brigades fought. Union brigade markers have a square base, and Confederate markers a round base. Granite markers with a bronze tablet stand at or near the command sites of the twenty-two Union divisions (2,500 to 5,000 men) and ten Confederate divisions (5,500 to 8,000 men). Similar corps markers indicate the headquarters of the seven Union infantry and one cavalry corps and the three Confederate infantry corps and one cavalry division. These markers describe the actions and casualties of those units during the battle.

The monuments of greatest interest to most visitors are those erected by the veterans (or their descendants) of many Union regiments and a few Confederate regiments that fought at Gettysburg, or by their states. Conforming to no single pattern or material or size, regimental monuments commemorate the actions and casualties of those regiments during the battle. Sometimes they list all the battles (and casualties) of the regiment during the entire war. Union regimental associations began placing monuments in the 1880s— forty-seven in 1885 alone—and by 1904 there were some 360 regimental and state monuments on the battlefield, nearly all of them Union. Many Northern states appropriated five hundred dollars or more to supplement private contributions for regimental monuments, and appropriated larger sums for the imposing state monuments.

Few Southern veterans or states had the resources or interest to commemorate a battle they had lost. Beginning with Virginia in 1917, however, Southern states and Confederate heritage groups began placing monuments, some of them of impressive size and beauty. My favorite, from an aesthetic standpoint, is the Virginia monument at midpoint on West Confederate Avenue. By one count, however, in the year 2000 there were 472 Union regimental and state monuments in the park, compared with only twenty-seven such Confederate monuments.

Our next stop will be at one of those Confederate monuments—and one of the park's newest—the equestrian statue of Longstreet near the Pitzer Woods sign on West Confederate Avenue, several hundred yards north of the observation tower visible in the distance. This is the first monument to Longstreet anywhere—testimony to his lack of popularity in the South. And for many years the North Carolina branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which launched the drive for a Longstreet monument with the slogan “It's About Time,” had difficulty raising funds. With the support of other groups (some in the North), they finally succeeded, and the monument was dedicated before a crowd of four thousand people on July 3, 1998, the 135th anniversary of the battle's final day.

It is about time for Longstreet to get his due. Historians have long recognized his abilities and have absolved him of responsibility for “losing” Gettysburg. Michael Shaara's novel The Killer Angels (1974) and the 1993 movie Gettysburg