‘Think About It Too Much and the Tears Well Up in Your Eyes’ : World Long Remembers Gettysburg as 125th Anniversary Nears

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — Robert Winn stands silently in the tall, wet grass, studying the gently sloping field before him the way an artist sizes up a blank canvas.

This is ground zero, the field where Confederate Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s charge was thwarted in the climactic action of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg.

More than 6,000 men were killed, wounded or reported missing in this field on July 3, 1863. With them, historians say, died the Confederate States of America’s attempt to withdraw from the United States and form a separate nation.

Although the combat took place 125 years ago, Winn of Washington, Ill., can see it clearly, even through the haze of a rainy day.

So can Gabor Boritt, a historian who lives on a nearby farm that was used as a Civil War hospital. “Shut your eyes and you can see the whole thing,” he says. “Think about it too much and the tears well up in your eyes.”

Lesson in Bloodshed

Winn can also see a lesson in the bloodshed of Pickett’s charge and the two days of fighting that preceded it.

“It’s history that I hope never repeats itself,” he says softly.

Army Capt. Phil Toms views the same field, thinking about what he would do if history does repeat.

“When I look at a piece of ground, I try to think what I would do if I had to fight here,” says the Kentuckian, who had an ancestor in the Confederate Army. “The battlefield is a good place to study small unit leadership skills.”

Winn and Toms are two of the more than 2 million visitors the National Park Service expects to tour the south-central Pennsylvania battlefield during an observance of the 125th anniversary, which officially began with a Memorial Day parade.

Attendance is expected to peak July 1, 2, and 3--the anniversary dates of the battle--and again on Nov. 19, the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to mark the opening of the military cemetery.

1.4 Million Visitors

Even when there are no special events, about 1.4 million tourists come each year to retrace the steps of the Union and Confederate armies through the boulder-strewn woods and fields where they fought the only major battle north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Some residents, and what the publisher of the town’s newspaper calls “the purist-type historians,” are up in arms about the cars and congestion, the proliferation of fast-food restaurants and souvenir shops, and a nearby observation tower that soars 307 feet above Cemetery Ridge.

While one faction worries about development and its effect on the historical site, another group battles a Park Service plan to continue restoring the battlefield and limit vehicle access to Devil’s Den, where Confederate sharpshooters hid among the rocks and fired on Union troops holding Little Round Top.

Bob Moore, the Park Service’s media director, expects 40,000 visitors a day at the beginning of July, more than five times the town’s population. Thousands more are likely to crowd into the cemetery in November.

Lincoln Detractor

That crowd would probably surprise a Civil War-era writer for the Harrisburg Patriot-Union newspaper. About a week after Lincoln’s speech, the unknown scribe noted: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation, we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.”

In the speech itself, Lincoln predicted: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here.” But, he added: “It can never forget what they did here.”

Park Service officials say the typical visitor stops for a few hours on a day trip, usually when on the way to another vacation spot. Winn, who enjoys reading about battles but doesn’t consider himself a Civil War buff, made a quick detour to the battlefield on the way to visit his daughter in Richmond.

Many of the short-term visitors are schoolchildren on field trips. Indeed, on some spring days the fields where wave after wave of Confederate soldiers marched to their deaths are filled with endless columns of students, whose primary interests seem to be when to eat and where to buy souvenirs.

Some Stay for Days

Other visitors, including Donald Southwell, stay for days. They tour every corner of the park, closely inspecting some of the 2,700 monuments and markers and visiting the museums and shops that crowd the roads.

Many also make side trips to the nearby Eisenhower farm, where President Dwight D. Eisenhower lived when he wasn’t in the White House.

Serious visitors can spend an hour or more in one place, solemnly surveying the rows of stark marble cubes marking the graves of unknown soldiers in the cemetery or replaying the heroics of Joshua Chamberlain at Little Round Top, Southwell’s favorite spot.

Chamberlain, a college professor commanding a regiment of volunteers, earned a niche in history on the rock-strewn hillside by ordering his men, who had run out of ammunition, to use bayonets to hold off Confederate fighters on the second day of fighting. Southern forces could have surrounded the Union lines if Chamberlain’s defense had failed.

‘Civil War Nut’

“You could spend a couple weeks here and still not see everything,” says Southwell, a self-professed “Civil War nut” from Grand Rapids, Mich., as he packs maps and other souvenirs into the trunk of his car.

Regardless of how long they stay, the visitors spend money. A recent study by a graduate student at Shippensburg State University estimates that tourists pump $42.7 million a year into the local economy. Tourism is the second-biggest industry in surrounding Adams County, behind agriculture.

“Since the day after the battle, people have continued to come here in great numbers,” Moore says. “You’re able to put your hand on history here.”

As he guides a visitor along the starting point of the Confederacy’s main attack, Boritt, a professor who directs the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, says the Civil War is “the central event of American mythology. It goes beyond history. It is brother against brother. It is war on a human scale.”

War’s Pivotal Event

The Union victory here was the pivotal event in the war because it ended a string of losses by the Army of the Potomac and because it forced Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army to retreat from Northern soil.

A Southern victory could have forced the North to surrender, some scholars say. Or it could have persuaded European governments to aid the Confederate cause.

Boritt, an intense man in his late 40s, became drawn to the Civil War after he left Hungary as a teen-ager in 1957.

Studying the war, he says, is part of “a love that I found in America. You adopt a country and you make an effort to become part of it. How better to do it than to get involved in the American Civil War?”

The professor, escorting some guests around the field, recounts Lee’s message to the Confederate fighters who straggled back from Pickett’s failed attempt to break the center of the Union line. “It’s all my fault,” the demoralized general is quoted as saying.

‘Historically Accurate’

“He’s historically accurate,” Boritt says. “It was his fault.”

When a guest who suggests that the outcome might have been different if Lt. Gen. James Longstreet had moved his men into position faster on the second day of the battle, Boritt retorts: “He was the brightest general on this battlefield.”

Col. Hal Nelson, who teaches at the U.S. Army War College in nearby Carlisle, says Longstreet’s action is just one of a number of questions military buffs continue to debate 125 years later.

They also argue about Lee’s decision to march on the Union center. They wonder if the fighting could have ended sooner if, on the first day, Confederate fighters had moved to the high ground of Cemetery Ridge after cracking one flank of the Union line.

Nelson says touring the battlefield is good training for officers because the Civil War was the first modern war and the tactics used then are still helpful in conventional warfare. Several times each year, he brings students from the War College and officers from regional Army bases here to debate tactics and study the terrain.

One War College student wrote that a visit to Gettysburg calls attention to “the fundamentals of our profession--courage, fortitude, perseverance and selflessness. There is something to be gained from walking those fields that will never be found on a computer terminal or Pentagon briefing chart.”