Sarah Takes Gettysburg

I haven't blogged for a couple of weeks; busy with work and the work blog, etc.

We're in Gettysburg; it's part of our effort to teach Sarah about Lincoln during the Lincoln bicentennial year, and we're using our Hampton Inn points for a free night's stay. One new attraction is the renovated David Wills house, where Lincoln spent the night before his speech at Gettysburg, putting the finishing touches on his "few appropriate remarks." It just opened to the public on Lincoln's birthday. Has the bed he slept in, etc.

We had lunch at Ernie's Texas Lunch, originally founded in 1921, "Home of the Texas Hot Weiner," and (this printed on the checks) "the most famous address in Gettysburg since Lincoln's." That kind of place.

Then I showed Sarah the Angle, and Little Round Top, and explained Pickett's Charge and Chamberlain and the 20th Maine; I have a DVD of the movie Gettysburg with us and am trying to get her to watch it (the movie made from The Killer Angels). I didn't subject her to a reading of the famous lines about Pickett's Charge from Intruder in the Dust; Faulkner's a bit heavy for the third grade, but I still think of it whenever I'm at the clump of trees, and my blog readers aren't getting off so easy:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

The editor in me says that someone should have given Faulkner some extra punctuation marks (a period here and there and a whole lot more commas would help), but it does evoke something anbout the mythology of Pickett's Charge for southerners (at least white southerners). And of course, unlike Faulkner, I never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I use too much punctuation.

Later: Sarah actually watched the Little Round Top and Clump of Trees scenes in Gettysburg, as we explained the places we were today. Of course she stayed up till midnight and I'm now updating this post after midnight, but otherwise I got the point across.

We'll do more of the battlefield tomorrow, and perhaps the Eisenhower farm.

Yes, the statues Tam is standing by (on Gettysburg's town square) in the picture above are of Abe Lincoln apparently giving directions to a 21st century tourist. I don't completely get the modern tourist statue, but what the heck. Abe's looking good.

One reason I'm a civil war buff, I think, is the knowledge that my ancestors fought on both sides. A Missouri great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy; a Georgia great-grandfather fought for the Union. Yes, you read that right: he was a member of one of only two companies of formal Georgia Union infantry (there were also some irregular guerrilla units). Not only was he a Georgian who fought for the Union, he later commanded one of the only two Grand Army of the Republic (the Union veterans' organization) posts in Georgia. Punchline: it was the William T. Sherman post. Really. He was also a Northern Methodist preacher in the south, and sometimes preached, I'm told, in black churches. His mentor used to preach wearing a sidearm since the KKK was after him. You can read my profile of the Rev. John Henry Dunn here, if you want to know more about him for some reason.

If my southern ancestor fought for the Union, my border state Missourian ancestor fought for the Confederacy. That was a lot more common, but it had the downside of his dying a long way from home, and being buried in Mississippi, a long way from the Ozarks. That's another story, But when I stand at the Angle at Gettysburg, I see myself on both sides, and when I stand on Little Round Top, I fully appreciate the accomplishment of Chamberlain, but I also, looking down that hillside, appreciate the guts it took for those Texas and Alabama boys who were trying to go uphill against a fortified position. Sam Hood is not one of my favorite Confederates -- I've been to Franklin, Tennessee, and that made less sense than Grant at Cold Harbor, and killed a bigger percentage in about the same amount of time, but unlike Grant, Hood blamed his men, not himself -- but at Little Round Top they ought to get credit for the sheer daring of it, though Chamberlain naturally deserves the reputation he has gained in recent years.

As for Pickett's Charge, well, back in the 80s when I didn't have a car I sometimes got to visit Civil War sites by giving tours for friends who did. After one friend had been with me to Gettysburg, we later were doing the Seven Days around Richmond, and at Malvern Hill, looking out from McClellan's position towards Lee's, he said, "this reminds me of Gettysburg." Ah, I thought, well are you learning from me, young Jedi. Indeed Lee's tendency for frontal assaults tended to come out when he didn't have Stonewall Jackson around to come up with a better plan. At Gettysburg, he should have listened to Longstreet. I have now offended roughly half of America's Civil War buffs and cheered the other half. Good thing no one reads this blog but family.

More on Gettysburg tomorrow.