Gettyburg

It wasn’t a planned stop, but after a week in Tennessee working on my apartments and three days on the road, I diverted to Gettysburg, only thirty miles from my annual route north and south.  For years I have whizzed by the city and historic battlefields of the Civil War where the south came to make a decisive statement in the north. I didn’t know what to expect.  I have been to great battlefields in Europe – Verdun and Normandy where nation’s victories were bought by the greatest of human sacrifices.  Here in the gentle fields and slopes of Pennsylvania the threshold to the greatest military engagement in the Western Hemisphere opened to reaffirm a Nation’s promise.  For three bloody days two armies collided. The battle turned the Civil War around for the Union, but the war was hardly over.

What words have not been said or written about these places where men died.  Despite the glory and the victories every man dies his own death on the battlefield. And if he walks away in whole or part, a bit of his soul died nevertheless.  For every man who remembers long after the smell of gun power has dissipated and walks the grounds where hell came to earth each takes away a stirring that separates him from the past, and yet connects him to his ancestors by blood or by cause.

They say, “Close your eyes and listen.”  This place among the rows of iron cannons and witness trees will speak. The wind will carry cries of men across the fields now full of song birds, and tiger lilies. Worm fences contain the spirits and souls of those who fought in sweat stained uniforms and blood soaked boots. The hollow grounds will whisper stories of torn and worn men, of flesh ripped from bones when to die was a blessing, to suffer a curse.

As I toured the front lines of the past engagements, I wondered about these men. Those who came from Texas and Maine, from New York and Louisiana, from Minnesota and South Carolina. Men who came from foreign lands and western frontiers. Of brothers and fathers, together and on opposing sides by fate or geography as much as philosophy. Here were the boys one day in June who woke in July to die as men.  Men of courage, of ignoble fear. Men of heroics, of cowardliness.  Men of God, of lost faith. Men who had everything to lose, others with nothing to gain.  Each sworn to the cause.

The cause?  States’ rights, slavery, expansion, Lincoln himself... However, the answer weighs more heavily... “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.”