The Long Memory of a Republic

I.

The bus from Harrisburg gets to Gettysburg at 10:15 on a Saturday morning in mid-October. The driver, who has done this run for twelve years, tells me to start at the Visitors' Center but not to spend more than an hour there. "The thing is the ridge," he says. "Everything else is commentary."

He is right and wrong. The thing is the ridge. But the commentary, accumulated over a century and a half of writing and rewriting what the ridge is for, is the more interesting subject.

I have come here three times now. Once as a teenager on a school trip. Once in my late twenties, with a friend who grew up in Virginia and who insisted I see the Confederate monuments first. Once now, with a notebook and an assignment to think about what Gettysburg currently remembers, and what it currently refuses to.

II. The first geography

The battlefield is fifteen miles north to south along three parallel ridges — Seminary Ridge on the west, Cemetery Ridge in the middle, and a longer, lower rise called Big Round Top and Little Round Top to the south. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia held Seminary Ridge for three days in July of 1863. The Union Army of the Potomac held Cemetery Ridge. Between them was a wheatfield, a peach orchard, and about a mile of open ground that the Confederate divisions of Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble attempted to cross on the afternoon of the third day.

You can drive the loop in about two hours. You can walk it in about six. You can stand at the high-water mark — a low stone wall on Cemetery Ridge where the Confederate assault reached and stopped — and look back across the field the way the Union defenders did, and you cannot help noticing how short the distance is. A mile. A long mile. But a mile.

The American Civil War was decided, in any meaningful sense, by the failure of a mile-long charge by twelve thousand men in the middle of a Pennsylvania farm.

III. What the monuments say

There are roughly thirteen hundred monuments on the field. Most are state monuments — Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Alabama, Virginia, Texas — built between 1880 and 1920. They are the densest concentration of public sculpture in the United States and possibly in the world.

The monuments do not say what you might expect. The Union monuments, in particular, are remarkably restrained. They do not say that the Union side was fighting to end slavery. Many of them, especially the ones from the 1880s and 1890s, do not mention slavery at all. They mention courage. They mention sacrifice. They mention the men who fell. They are written in the register of reconciliation — the register the country adopted, with appalling speed, in the decades after the war, when the political project of remembering what the war had actually been about was abandoned in favor of a story about brave Americans on both sides.

David Blight, the historian, called this the "reconciliationist memory" of the war. It dominated American Civil War remembrance for roughly a century, from the 1880s through the 1960s, and large portions of the Gettysburg battlefield are physical artifacts of it. The Confederate monuments — and there are many — were almost all built in this period. The state of Virginia's monument, with Lee on horseback facing east toward the Union line, was dedicated in 1917. The North Carolina monument was dedicated in 1929. The Mississippi monument went up in 1973.

Walking the Confederate line on Seminary Ridge is, in this sense, walking a curated memory of the Lost Cause that was assembled long after the war and that has very little to do with the actual experience of the Confederate soldiers who fought there. Most of them were poor men conscripted out of the Carolinas and Virginia. Most of them did not own slaves. They were nevertheless fighting in defense of a political and economic system whose central institution was slavery, and the monuments on Seminary Ridge will not tell you that.

IV. What the cemetery does

The National Cemetery, at the north end of Cemetery Ridge, is a different kind of memorial.

It is small — only seventeen acres — and laid out in a half-circle of graves arranged by state. The Union dead are buried here in the rough order they were brought from the field by burial details in the weeks after the battle. They were numbered, identified where possible, and laid out by the landscape architect William Saunders in a design intended to suggest the equality of the dead. There is no hierarchy of grave size. Officers and privates are buried side by side. The graves of the unknown — and there are many — are interspersed with the named.

It was at the dedication of this cemetery, on November 19, 1863, that Lincoln gave the two-and-a-half-minute speech we now call the Gettysburg Address. He was not the principal speaker. Edward Everett, the former senator and Harvard president, spoke for two hours before him; Everett's address is barely remembered now except for the courteous note he sent Lincoln the next day saying he wished he had said in two hours what Lincoln had said in two minutes.

The text of the address is mounted on a bronze plaque near the spot where Lincoln stood. It is short enough that you can read it in less time than it takes the average tourist to find the right angle for a photograph.

The address does what almost none of the surrounding monuments do. It says explicitly what the war was about. It says that the nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition; that the war was a test of whether any nation so conceived could long endure; that the dead had given their lives so that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth. It refuses to be reconciliationist. It refuses to be neutral about the cause.

It is the single most uncompromising piece of American political prose I know.

V. What is still missing

Walk the cemetery and you will notice something. There are very few Black graves. The Union army had roughly two hundred thousand Black soldiers by the end of the war; none of them fought at Gettysburg. The United States Colored Troops were not yet integrated into the Army of the Potomac in July of 1863. The Gettysburg dead are, almost entirely, white.

But Black people lived in Gettysburg. The town had a small free Black community before the war — about two hundred fifty people — and most of them fled or hid when the Confederate army arrived, because the Confederate cavalry under Albert Jenkins had been seizing free Black civilians in the Pennsylvania countryside and sending them south into slavery. The fate of those captured at and around Gettysburg has been documented in recent years by the historian David G. Smith and others; the number runs into the dozens, at minimum.

There is no monument on the battlefield to those captured civilians. There is no plaque. The Park Service has begun, in the last decade or so, to mention them in the Visitors' Center exhibits. It is an improvement and it is also, plainly, not enough.

This is the part Gettysburg still refuses to remember at the scale it remembers everything else. The battle, in the end, was fought between two armies on a Pennsylvania farm. But the war the battle was part of was fought over whether the United States would continue to be a country in which the Confederate cavalry could ride into a Pennsylvania town and seize free Black people from their homes. That second fact is much harder to put on a bronze plaque than a line of guns at the high-water mark.

VI. Leaving

I walk the field on Sunday morning. There is a school group from somewhere outside Philadelphia, a half-dozen reenactors in full Union kit conducting a private ceremony at one of the Pennsylvania monuments, two elderly couples in motorized scooters making the slow loop around Cemetery Ridge.

The reenactors are doing something I find moving and a little uncomfortable. They are calling the roll of their regiment — the 28th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry — and after each name they say "present" or "killed" or "wounded, died at Chambersburg." The list takes about twenty minutes. There is no audience. They are doing it for themselves.

That, I think, is what the long memory of a republic actually looks like, day to day. Not the monuments. Not even the cemetery. Six middle-aged men in wool uniforms reading a list of names on a Sunday morning in October, in a field where almost nothing happens now, in a country that is still arguing about whether the men on the list died for the reason Lincoln said they did.

The argument is not over. The ridge knows that.