On Saturday, June 24, 1967, one of a car full of National Institutes of Health college-student guinea pigs, I visited Gettysburg National Military Park for the first time.
I can’t remember what my friends did. I headed to the information desk to ask about the Sherfy property. By chance, the ranger on duty took a serious interest in my great-great-great uncle Joseph’s house, barn, peach orchard, and fields–landmarks in the second day’s battle. He offered a quick tour of the property, recently acquired by the National Park Service, when he could leave the front desk.
Enchanted already with that friendly, personal introduction, I returned to the Visitor Center in time to see the Cyclorama show–the light and sound portrayal of the third day’s final battle, set against Paul Phillippoteaux’s enormous, graphically-accurate circular painting.
Then, still alone, I spent a quarter on This Hallowed Ground—the High Water Mark Walking Tour booklet and followed its directions to the tour’s beginning.
I was a cocky college junior—a history major; a sheltered small town Kansas girl, and a blasé pacifist Church of the Brethren member. My father and his brother both faced tough decisions in World War II—my dad choosing a noncombatant Navy position; my uncle joining the newly-legal Civilian Public Service. In 1967, I’d hardly bothered to participate in my peers’ Vietnam War protests. I’d heard little from and asked even less about high school classmates who were already in Vietnam.
At Gettysburg, on July 1, 2, and 3, 1863, topography and timing set the table. After two and half years of warfare, the Union army was on the ropes. Timidity, incompetent generals, and fate contributed to the Union’s systematic losses. In June 1863, emboldened by their success, the Southern Army of Northern Virginia made a run for Washington D. C. As Union troops hurried to catch up and create a barrier between the Capital and the Rebel army, they streamed into Gettysburg from the east and south. Confederate soldiers had already filtered into the western and northern edges of town. Ultimately, General Robert E. Lee’s forces took positions along Seminary Ridge in a large fish-hook shape that encompassed the entire town. General George Gordon Meade’s Union troops, arrayed along a parallel inside fish-hook, acquired Cemetery Ridge, commanding higher ground and a shorter battle line than their adversaries.
The first day of battle established those positions. On the second day, Lee directed his officers to attack each end of the Union’s fish hook and bend the flanks back until his men could surround the Union army. When that didn’t work, Lee believed his only remaining play was to attack and break through the center of the Union line: a cluster of old grove trees–the Copse of Trees—standing starkly in the middle of the Union-held ridge.
By the third day of battle, officers on both sides anticipated Lee’s strategy. Along Cemetery Ridge, massed at its center, Union infantry and artillery men hunkered down through the morning. They lay in humid 87 degree sun behind farmers’ stone walls. To the west, Confederate men wrote letters home and shifted restlessly, finding shade, fighting anxiety. Their commanders tried to argue Lee out of the last-ditch wildly risky charge across a mile of open ground.
At one pm, salvos of Confederate canon fire from Seminary Ridge came as no surprise. Meant to create havoc among Union troops trapped in the sun and soften the center of the Union line, the cannonade accomplished neither. Gun sights on Rebel cannon had been set too high—and long. Shells fell behind Union lines. Union artilleryman waited until the smoke cleared enough for them to fire accurately at Confederate batteries.
An hour later, Lee ordered General George Pickett’s division and two others to advance toward the Copse. With medieval pageantry, 15,000 men marched in ranked lines across farm fields. Union forces held their fire until Southern troops got close–struggling over rocks and fences as they navigated the uphill slope. Finally Union General Meade’s men rained shrapnel, double canister, rifle, and cannon fire down on and into the virtually defenseless Confederates. Half of the 15,000 would not return to the Confederate line on Seminary Ridge.
The little High Water Mark booklet, only as big as my hand, guided me along an asphalt path. It wound toward the center of Union position, below the equestrian statue of a dour General Meade, past representative sets of cannon, toward angled lines of low stone walls, and finally to the Copse of Trees.
Hot and sticky, I’d read most of this synopsis by the time I reached the Copse. But the High Water Mark “walk into history” continued. It led down the slope below that clump of trees and then turned back on itself to follow the footsteps of the last few Confederate soldiers scrambling uphill–too close to their enemy to do anything but fight with bayonets and rifle stocks. There they surrendered, died, or fell back. The tide of Confederacy success had reached its highest point—the High Water Mark–and begun to recede.
The tides of my own life had just begun to gather.
Back up on the Union line, every simplistic and intellectual acquaintance I’d enjoyed with history disappeared as I caught my breath in that July heat.
Surrounded by books and good lecturers, I came to Gettysburg seeing historic events as puzzle pieces moved into their final arrangement by greed, chance, prejudice, geography, weather, religion, bravado. I’d enjoyed unraveling and reconstituting the story line of humans shifting across landscapes, falling back, punching forward. History had been very literally, academic to me. A performance separated from my life by the scrim of time.
Here, on the Pennsylvania dirt I’d scuffed into my sandals; here, beside the Copse of Trees—some of which had witnessed the battle; here, where minie ball holes pocked barns and houses, I couldn’t keep the scrim down. Here, right where I stood, men, really boys—Union and Rebel–alive and scared and curious and hopeful–waited in the sun for hours—with plenty of time to anticipate, not just that they would die, but how. With plenty of time to picture their families, their homes and some quiet little dreams held before this exhausting, unending war began. With plenty of time to think about whether their cause—whichever it was—was worthy.
My epiphany that day—however ordinary and obvious—was grasping that the 150,000 actors in the Gettysburg pageant were not paper dolls or x’s on a map, but fully plumped up, hungry, hurting, three-dimensional, complicated humans. And tumbling in on that revelation was the certainty that I would never ever really understand all that any of my predecessors believed or felt. That life and history were searches–without any glib answers.
At one go, my casual assumption that war was wrong had also been challenged by Gettysburg’s dead—many, though not all, who willingly chose to take up arms for principles they cherished. I began to consider how humans endure pain and fear I’d likely never know. At one go, I started to consider battlefield realities—for instance, how long it took a man to load a muzzle-loading rifle measured against how quickly he could die—torso exposed to the soldier in front of him.
I was bewitched by the battlefield itself. The real place, the real dirt, the real rock outcroppings, the farmsteads. Here, on the ground still holding blood shed a century ago, I could not consign the Battle of Gettysburg to scholarly contemplation. In the landscape around me, more than 50,000 men were killed or wounded. Here, they couldn’t be discounted. Or minimized by my naivete. Or glorified. Or explained by a church’s doctrine
Most people find their way to those epiphanies and that fledgling empathy sometime in their lives—many long before I did at the age of 20. That day was my turn. And my place.
A year later, maybe on the strength of my Sherfy family connection, I was back on the battlefield in National Park Service uniform—a tailored dark green gabardine suit with a nipped-in waist, white blouse, brown heels, and a matching stewardess hat settled two fingers above my right eye. I was the only female summer seasonal ranger among a crew of twelve guys whose draft numbers for Vietnam had yet to come up. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot the spring before we arrived. On the morning of June 7, I walked down the hill to the Visitor Center to see the flag at half-staff, mourning Robert Kennedy. We carried the February image of a Vietcong officer being shot at point blank range on a Saigon street.
If in 1967 Gettysburg’s DNA-laden soil had brought me humility and a baptism of awareness, 1968 shocked and saddened me to action. I joined our baker’s dozen of interpreters to provide the statistics of death as powerfully as possible, to describe in detail the shattered bones and shredded organs that a minie ball produced, to recount how the piles of amputated limbs grew around each surgeon’s tent. Just a slight revision in what we chose to interpret bent Gettysburg’s story to our Vietnam and civil rights’ passions. The gore rather than the glory. Once Gettysburg battle reunions, the 25th and the 50th even the 75th, showcased bearded Confederate and Union veterans shaking hands and smiling across the High Water Mark’s stone walls to brisk tunes from military bands. The Gettysburg we served in the late nineteen-sixties needed some corrective reality, we thought. Who knows if we went too far?
What I didn’t do that summer nor since was return to the dogma on which I’d grown up. I believe that living peacefully is far superior to hating and fighting. I also believe that the more we place ourselves in the midst of historic sites, the truer our search for what others have thought and felt will be. I also understood that by temperament and skill I could champion causes with words and public service more effectively than with riots or blind anger.
That High Water Mark walk was the cataclysmic breech in the dam of childhood assumptions. And the joyful frame for all my life’s choices: suitors, jobs, homes.
I’ve never quit falling in love with the surviving places where humans have lived and worshiped and died and worked and created. I am kept honest by the sites where humans have been their most cruel and violent. All those remnants—all the porches framing a Butte boarding house and the wagon ruts that wind up to gold mines, the stone alleys smelling of centuries’ old piss, the scent of snow and death in the wind along Marias River tie me tightly to the complex, unknowable, fascinating sentient beings who lived before. And allow them to pose the questions I need to consider. ©
