Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (11 page)

T
HE CONFEDERATE RETREAT
from Gettysburg turned into a nightmare. An ambulance train several miles long jounced over rutted roads and bogged down axle-deep in mud, causing untold agony for the ten thousand wounded men that the Army of Northern Virginia managed to take along on the retreat. They had to leave behind at least seven thousand wounded to be treated by Union surgeons, who had their hands full with fourteen thousand Union wounded. As well as farmhouses and barns on the battlefield, virtually every public building and many homes in town became hospitals. The medical corps set up numerous tent hospitals as well. Hundreds of volunteers flocked to Gettysburg to help care for the wounded. Burial details hastily interred more than three thousand dead Union soldiers and many of the almost four thousand dead Confederates. Four
thousand of the wounded, about evenly divided between the two sides, subsequently died of their wounds. Five thousand dead horses were doused with coal oil and burned. For months the stench of hospitals, and of corpses unburied or buried in shallow graves, hung over the town and countryside.

Meanwhile the Army of the Potomac, prodded by President Lincoln and General-in-Chief Halleck, plodded through the mud in pursuit of Lee. Union cavalry captured the Confederate wagon train carrying the pontoons necessary to bridge the Potomac. Swollen by rain, the river was unfordable. Lincoln urged Meade to attack the Rebels while they were trapped north of the Potomac. Lee fortified a defensive perimeter at Williamsport, Maryland (forty miles southwest of Gettysburg), with both flanks on the river. There he awaited attack while his engineer corps frantically tore down buildings to construct a new set of pontoons to bridge the raging Potomac.

When news reached Washington of Vicksburg's surrender to Grant on the Fourth of July, and of other Union victories in Tennessee and Louisiana, Lincoln was jubilant. “If General Meade can complete his work by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee's army,” said the Union president on July 7, “the rebellion will be over.” Lincoln hovered around the War Department telegraph office “anxious and
impatient” for news from Meade. But the Union commander and his men were exhausted from lack of sleep and endless slogging through quagmires called roads. The Confederate earthworks at Williamsport were formidable, even though Lee had only 45,000 tired men to defend them while reinforcements had brought Meade's strength back up to 85,000. Meade's famous temper grew short as messages from Halleck pressed him to attack. Lincoln's temper also grew short. When Meade finally telegraphed on July 12 that he intended “to attack them tomorrow, unless something intervenes,” Lincoln commented acidly, “They will be ready to fight a magnificent battle when there is no enemy to fight.”

Events proved Lincoln right. Meade delayed another day, and when the Army of the Potomac went forward on July 14 they found nothing but a rear guard. The dropping river had enabled the enemy to vanish across a patched-together bridge and a nearby ford during the night. “Great God!” exclaimed Lincoln when he heard this news. “We had them in our grasp. We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand and would not close it.”

Lincoln may have been right about that—or he may not have been. A Union assault might have succeeded—with heavy casualties—or it might not have.
In either case, destruction of Lee's veteran army was far from a certainty. When Meade learned of Lincoln's dissatisfaction, he offered his resignation. This was a serious matter. Despite his caution and slowness, Meade had won public acclaim for his victory at Gettysburg. Lincoln could hardly afford to fire him two weeks after the battle. So he refused to accept the resignation, and sat down to write Meade a soothing letter.

As the president's pen scratched across the paper, however, the letter became anything but soothing. Gettysburg was a “magnificent success” for which Lincoln was “very—very—grateful to you.” But, “my dear General,” the president continued, “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.” As Lincoln reread these words, he realized that the letter would scarcely mollify Meade's feelings. So he filed it away in his papers and never sent it.

The war did continue for another twenty-one months. Whether it would have ended if Meade had “closed upon” Lee at Williamsport is anybody's guess. In any event, people in the North immediately saw
Gettysburg as a turning point in their favor. “VICTORY! WATERLOO ECLIPSED!” blazoned the headline in a Philadelphia newspaper. In New York a lawyer wrote in his diary that “the results of this victory are priceless. The charm of Robert Lee's invincibility is broken. The Army of the Potomac has at last found a general that can handle it, and has stood nobly up to its terrible work in spite of its long disheartening list of hard-fought failures. Copperheads are palsied and dumb for the moment at least. Government is strengthened four-fold at home and abroad.”

In London the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg drove the final nail into the coffin of Confederate hopes for European diplomatic recognition. “The disasters of the rebels are unredeemed by even any hope of success,” wrote young Henry Adams from London, where he was secretary to his father, the American minister to the Court of St. James. “It is now conceded that all idea of [British] intervention is at an end.”

Some southerners also recognized the pivotal importance of Gettysburg. “The news from Lee's army is appalling,” wrote Confederate War Department clerk John B. Jones in his diary on July 9. “This is the darkest day of the war.” The fire-eating Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin “never before felt so despondent as to our struggle.” Confederate Ordnance Chief Josiah Gorgas, who had performed miracles to keep Southern armies supplied with weapons
and ammunition, wrote in his diary at the end of July 1863: “Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburg, and even Philadelphia. Vicks-burg seemed to laugh all Grant's efforts to scorn.… It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space. Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion.”

By this time Lincoln had recovered his spirits. In early August his private secretary wrote that the president “is in fine whack. I have seldom seen him so serene.” In addition to other Union military successes that took place in the latter half of 1863, the administration's emancipation policy gained broader support in the North. The Union army began organizing black regiments composed mainly of former slaves. They acquitted themselves well in minor battles during 1863. The off-year state elections of 1863, especially in the key states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, were shaping up as a sort of referendum on the Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans won impressive victories in those elections. If the Emancipation Proclamation had been submitted to a referendum a year earlier, commented an Illinois newspaper in November, “there is little doubt that the voice of a majority would have been against it. And not a year has passed before it is
approved by an overwhelming majority.” A New Yorker noted that “the change of opinion on this slavery question since 1860 is a great historical fact. God pardon our blindness of three years ago.”

No single event did more to change the Northern mood than the victory at Gettysburg. It was appropriate, therefore, that Lincoln should offer the most profound and eloquent statement there on the meaning of this new birth of freedom.

Soon after the battle, David Wills, a Gettysburg lawyer, proposed to Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania the establishment of a soldiers’ cemetery where the Union dead could be reburied with dignity and honor. Curtin contacted the governors of other Northern states whose soldiers had died at Gettysburg. They all thought it was a splendid idea. The project went forward, and became the model for reinterment of Union war dead in two dozen national cemeteries during and after the war. (Many Confederate dead were reburied in Confederate cemeteries throughout the South.) The dedication of the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg, adjacent to the local burial ground where some of the fighting had taken place, occurred on November 19, 1863.

Let us conclude our walk by proceeding to this most hallowed of ground, where some 3,577 Union soldiers (half of them unknown) from eighteen states are buried. None of them was from Kentucky. But at
the spot where Lincoln was long thought to have stood to deliver his “few appropriate remarks,” Kentucky erected a modest marker to her native son, enshrining in bronze the 272 words of the address Lincoln delivered that day. (The actual spot was probably thirty yards to the south, but it hardly matters.) Edward Everett, the main orator of the occasion, penned Lincoln a note next day: “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

It is best to come here at dusk, as I do when I take students to Gettysburg, and listen to the call of mourning doves as we look out over the graves in this pastoral setting. It is then that we contemplate the real meaning of “that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” Gettysburg is important not primarily as the high-water mark of the Confederacy, but as the place where “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

F
OUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO
our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

J
AMES
M. M
C
P
HERSON
was born in North Dakota and grew up in Minnesota, where he graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College. He did his graduate study at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he became fascinated by the American Civil War and the issues over which it was fought. While in graduate school he began visiting Civil War battlefields, including Gettysburg. During forty years on the faculty at Princeton University, he has taken students, colleagues, alumni, and many other groups on tours of the Gettysburg battlefield on numerous occasions.
Hallowed Ground
is his fourteenth book on the Civil War era. His
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
(1988) won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1989, and his
For Cause and Comrades
(1997) won the Lincoln Prize in 1998. He is currently serving as president of the American Historical Association.