Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [2]
I have lost count of the number of times I have been to Gettysburg. I have toured the battlefield by car, by bus, on a bicycle, and on foot. Over the past twenty years I have taken Princeton students, alumni, friends, and miscellaneous groups on at least two dozen tours of the battlefield. I have made so many visits to the college and town, as well as the battlefield, that Gettysburg has become almost a second home. I honestly believe that if I were blindfolded and winched down from a helicopter to any spot on the battlefield on a moonlit night, I could remove the blindfold and identify my surroundings within minutes.
I would not have known where I was on many parts of the battlefield in 1863, however. Not only did all those orchards exist then, but there are also some six hundred acres of woods today that were cleared then, and about 150 acres of cleared land today that were wooded in 1863. Another six hundred acres of woods that existed in the same places then as now were woodlots in 1863, where farmers harvested dead trees and some live ones for fuel and fencing. They also allowed livestock to graze in some of these wood-lots, which kept them free from undergrowth. Many of the woodlots were therefore open and parklike in 1863, enabling troops to move through and fight in them where saplings and undergrowth today would make such activities impossible.
The Park Service plans to remove 150 acres of woods that did not exist in 1863, to reforest fifty acres (plus the orchards) where woods did exist in 1863, and to cull some trees from the six hundred acres of wood-lots. When they have done so, it will be easier to see and understand the lines of sight, approach, and combat that existed in 1863 (though the culled woodlots will soon grow up in brush and saplings again in the absence of grazing livestock, for which the Park Service has no plans). Until (and even after) this cutting and culling happens, however, the first thing a tour guide must tell listeners is to imagine a cleared field or a parklike woodlot where there are thick woods today, or imagine an orchard or a grove where there are none today. Such a feat of imagination is not always easy.
What brought those 165,000 soldiers—75,000 Confederate, 90,000 Union—to Gettysburg during the first three days of July 1863? Why did they lock themselves in such a deathgrip across these once bucolic fields until 11,000 of them were killed and mortally wounded, another 29,000 were wounded and survived, and about 10,000 were “missing”—mostly captured. By way of comparison, those 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg—27,000 Confederate,∗ 23,000 Union-were almost ten times the number of American casualties on D-Day, June 6, 1944. What was accomplished by all of this carnage? Join me for a walk on this hallowed ground, where we will try to answer these questions.
∗Because of incomplete records, the number of Confederate casualties at Gettysburg is an estimate. Such estimates range from 23,000 to 28,000.
Day One: July 1, 1863
WE'LL BEGIN OUR tour three miles north-west of the Gettysburg town square, at the intersection of Knoxlyn Road and U.S. Route 30, the historic Chambersburg Pike. Here, on the morning of July 1, were posted the outlying pickets of the Eighth Illinois Cavalry. As the sun burned away the mist, they spotted a column of Confederate infantry marching toward them. At 7:30 A.M., Lieutenant Marcellus Jones rested a breech-loading Sharps carbine on a fence rail and fired at the enemy. It was the first shot in the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere.
Why were these soldiers here, more than one hundred miles north of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, where they had confronted each other until only three weeks earlier? After scrambling up the steep bank on the north side of Route 30 to look at the small “first shot” marker to the left of an abandoned house, let's head southeast on Route 30 almost two miles to the parking lot behind the guide station at the National Park entrance. From there we'll walk a hundred