May 14, 2024
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
For me, the best antidote to cynicism and despair is appreciation. For that reason, on May 1st I traveled from California to Pennsylvania to marvel at the courage and hope of our Founding Fathers and our soldiers at places like Valley Forge and here at Gettysburg.
I enjoy basking in the reflected glory of people who sacrificed their peace and tranquility and sometimes even their lives for the common good. It’s a humbling but healthy reminder to my ego that there are millions of Americans who have done far more for their country than I ever will.
Just south of the small town of Gettysburg is the national park dedicated to preserving the stories of this largest battle in North American history. 160,000 warriors representing the North and the South clashed here, of whom at least 7,000 were killed and 33,000 wounded, plus thousands more missing and captured.
This beautiful green parkland of rolling hills and grasslands is filled with about 1,800 combat monuments, 400 cannon, and thousands of graves. And more drama of life and death than one can comprehend.
One of the many heroes who fought here in July of 1863 was Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from Maine. While defending the Little Round Top hill, he and his men were almost out of ammunition, so in desperation he led his regiment in a bayonet charge down the hill, routing the shocked Confederates and saving the Union flank from collapse.
Almost two years later, Chamberlain, now a general, witnessed the 1865 surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. As the rebels marched down the road, Chamberlain ordered his men to snap to attention out of respect for their defeated opponents.
As he later recalled, “All the while on our part not a sound of trumpet or drum, not a cheer, nor a word nor motion of man, but awful stillness as if it were the passing of the dead.”
A Confederate general passing in front of Chamberlain later praised him as “one of the knightliest soldiers of the Federal Army.”
In 1889 Chamberlain returned to Gettysburg, where he sensed the presence of his fallen comrades: “In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger…And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that…we know not of…(are)…drawn to see where…great things were suffered and done for them…”
As Chamberlain predicted, generations have followed in his footsteps, and over the last two days I’ve had the privilege of being one of those pilgrims. The climactic fight of Gettysburg is known as Pickett’s Charge, where Robert E. Lee ordered 12,000 of his Confederate infantry to cross a mile-long farmland to attack the Union defenders. About 5,000 of Lee’s men were killed or wounded before they had to retreat.
As I prepared to walk across the killing field of Pickett’s Charge, a woman called out to me and pointed to a rainbow appearing over the field of battle.
I then marched joyfully into the grassland toward the Union line, alone in the vast theater of war, with thousands of men on either side of me, and thousands facing us in the distance. All of us, Americans. All of us, human beings. All of us, dead and alive. All of us, one people, one spirit, one rainbow.