Day 125. July 3, 1862.
125
Laid end to end, their dead bodies would have stretched three miles….
Thursday 3
I came home this forenoon and got ready and Mrs B and I went to Hollidaysburg to Brother Jacobs.* Quite warm this day. I saw Helemieman Rev Shidler
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 50
“The heat on the third day of Gettysburg grew so fierce that Lieutenant W.B. Taylor of the 11th North Carolina saw men faint all along the line.”
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. viii
“After Gettysburg, General George Meade told his wife that during the past ten days “I have lived as much as in the last thirty years.’”
Ken Burns’s the Civil War: Historians Respond Robert Brent Toplin P. 91-92 “Lincoln and Gettysburg: The Hero and the Heroic Place.” Gabor S. Boritt
“Day three is Pickett’s Charge. The seven-hour struggle for Culp’s Hill is lost. Chronology is upended for the sake of drama. The visual images at times do not match the spoken words and when they do they can still give a false impression. For example Lewis Armistead, who breaches the Federal center, is shown on horseback in the romantic painting of Paul Phillip– poteaux that now hangs in the Cyclorama of the Gettysburg National Military Park. Of course the Virginian marched and ran, like the other rebs, because a man on horseback could not have survived on the slopes of Cemetery Ridge. One wonders whether discomfort with military matters produces gaffes that turn “aim low” into the soundtrack’s “aim slow,” or is Garrison Keillor misreading the text and nobody knows enough to catch the error? Is this why the Taneytown Road becomes the Tarreytown Road? The inconsequential and the historically forgivable shade into the substantive until the battle becomes little more than the saga of Chameberlin and Pickett’s Charge.
After the battle the Union commander, George S. Meade, loses the “opportunity to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia.” If anything might be said for Meade it remains unsaid. All along the complex becomes simple. The battle after all is fought in the film to relieve the siege of Vicksburg and no more; and fought at Gettysburg because of a search for nonexistent shoes.”
Note: https://www.nps.gov/gett/planyourvisit/cyclorama.htm
The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War Mark M. Smith P. 74
This was the day when 12,000 Confederates, led by Major General Pickett, stepped off Seminary Ridge and walked a mile through an open field to take Cemetery Ridge from the federals. Those who made it to the ridge fought bravely, courageously, hand-to-hand in many cases—but so many of them did not. About 10,000 Americans died in that roughly one-hour interval. That’s about 165 deaths per minute; over two and a half deaths every brutal second. Laid end to end, their dead bodies would have stretched three miles.
YouTube. Ken Burns: The Civil War Season 1, Episode 4 “Simply Murder. Three Gettysburg Park Guides discussing Pickett’s Charge:
“How beautifully they came on, their bright bayonets glistening in the sunlight made the line look like a huge serpent of blue and steel. We could see our shells bursting in their ranks making great gaps that [inaudible] came as though they would go straight through us and over us. Now we gave them canister and that staggered them a few more paces onward and the Georgians in the road below us rose up and let loose a storm of lead into the faces of the advancing brigade. The brilliant assault of their Irish Brigade was beyond description. We forgot they were fighting us and cheer after cheer at their fearlessness went up along our lines. This was Pickett’s Charge, the largest artillery barrage ever in the western hemisphere. This was Lee’s last chance. Philly was 120 miles East, & D.C. 80 to the South. This could be heard 40 miles away in Harrisburg. The Rebel assault stretched one mile. They did breach the Union line & a few men ran forward & planted the Rebel flag in a “brave but futile gesture” but Lee lost 1/3 of his army at Gettysburg. You’ll hear they were 25 feet off, but they did break through.”
The Paris Review “Shelby Foote, The Art of Fiction No. 158” Issue 151, Summer, 1999
Foote: The single greatest mistake of the war by any general on either side was made by Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, when he sent Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s divisions across that open field, nearly a mile wide, against the gunsplaced on a high ridge and troops down below them, with skirmishers out front. There was no chance it could succeed. Longstreet told him that beforehand and Lee proceeded to prove him right. Having made this greatest of all mistakes, Lee rode out on the field and met those men coming back across the field– casualties were well over fifty percent– and said, It’s all my fault. He said it then on the field; he said it afterwards, after he’d gotten across the Potomac; he said it in his official report a month later. He said, I may have asked more of my men than men should be asked to give. He’s a noble man, noble beyond comparison.
Note: “It’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon” is so famous a Civil War literature line that I, not knowing when or where the war was fought when I began research, had heard it countless times over the decades. The meaning was always apparent, & I love it for the sense of slippery time it evinces, the sheer hope, the will, grief, & melancholy longing. If you read it aloud you might cry despite yourself, while at the same time hearing it in a Friday Night Lights coach voice. Here Gallagher & Nolan quote Lawyer Gavin Stevens, Faulker’s character in Intruder in the Dust, talking to his nephew. (This is William Faulkner’s writing in his novel.)
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday wont be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give his word and it’s all int he balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead [sic] and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t even need a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with absolute and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.”
Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War David Silkenat P. 134
Meade had often been unfairly criticized for not pursuing Lee’s army more vigorously. Although he decided not to order a general counterattack with his battered army, Meade did not allow Lee’s army to retreat into Confederate territory unmolested. Early on the morning of July 4, he ordered cavalry regiments to “harass and annoy him as much as possible in his retreat.” These Union raids against the retreating Confederate column resulted in the liberation of a significant number of prisoners of war and the surrender of thousands of Confederates. Stretching more than a dozen miles, the long Confederate cavalry conducting these raids occasionally found themselves outnumbered by Confederates, requiring the cavalrymen to surrender.
Eyewitness to History Edited by John Carey (1987) P. 368-369
Gettysburg: The Confederate Bombardment, 3 July 1863:
“Samuel Wilkeson writes his despatch beside the body of his son, Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson, killed in the first day’s fighting.”
“Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly absorbing interest—the dead body of an oldest born, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay? . . .
For such details as I have the heart for. The battle commenced at daylight, on the side of the horseshoe position, exactly opposite to that which Ewell had sworn to crush through. Musketry preceded the rising of the sun. A thick wood veiled this fight, but out of the leafy darkness arose the smoke and the surging and swelling of the fire . . .
Suddenly, and about ten in the forenoon, the firing on the east side and everywhere about our lines ceased. A silence of deep sleep fell upon the field fo battle. Our army cooked, ate and slumbered. The rebel army moved 120 guns to the west, and massed there Longstreet’s corps and Hill’s corps to hurl them upon the really weakest point of our entire position.
Eleven o’clock—twelve o’clock—one o’clock. In the shadow cast by the tiny farmhouse, sixteen by twenty, where General Meade had made his headquarters, lay wearied staff officers and tired reporters. There was not wanting to the peacefulness of the scene the singing of a bird, which had a nest in a peach tree within the tiny yard of the whitewashed cottage. In the midst of its warbling a shell screamed over the house, instantly followed by another and another, and in a moment the air was full of the most complete artillery prelude to an infantry battle that was ever exhibited. Every size and form of shell known to British and to American gunnery shrieked, moaned, whirled, whistled, and wrathfully fluttered over our ground . . . Through the midst of the storm of screaming and exploding shells an ambulance, driven by its frenzied conductor at full speed, presented to all of us the marvellous spectacle of a horse going rapidly on three legs. A hinder one had been shot off at the hock . . . During this fire the houses at twenty and thirty feet distant were receiving their death, and soldiers in Federal blue were torn to pieces in the road and died with the peculiar yells that blend the extorted cry of pain with horror and despair. Not an orderly, not an ambulance, not a straggler was to be seen upon the plain swept by this tempest of orchestral death thirty minutes after it commenced.”
How the South Could Have Won the Civil War:The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat Bevin Alexander P. 246
“The three-day battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest in American history– 50,000 Americans killed, wounded, captured, or missing. The Confederates suffered irreparable losses, 27,000 men– more than a third of Lee’s army. In Pickett’s Charge alone, about half of the 13,500 Confederates who made the attack were killed, wounded, or captured. The survivors of Pickett’s division actually abandoned the battlefield, a sight never before witnessed in the Army of the Potomac.
After Pickett’s disatrous repulse, there would be no improvement in Confederate strategy and tactics. And though Lee asked a subordinate general to “help me out of” the hole he had dug for the Confederates, in fact there would be no more mystifying maneuvers to rescue the Rebels like the ones Stonewall Jackson had carried out in the Shenandoah Valley and at Chancellorsville. Pickett’s Charge was not only the high-water mark of the Confederacy; indeed, it marked the moment when the South lost the war.”
Note: From The Passing of the Armies, Joshua Chamberlain:
Note: “Strange Tales of Civil War Medicine” (youtube, minute 31) video posted by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine quotes Union nurse Clara Jones on Gettysburg, July 6: “Pieces of shell scattered around the remains of dead horses and pieces of guns, belts, caps, and cartridge boxes. Long lines of newly made graves, some of them having been recovered by their friends. All these gave the otherwise beautiful spot a very desolate appearance. We could see where the hardest fighting took place without any guide. In one small field I counted upwards of fifty dead horses, some with all the harnesses yet on. In three different places, six lay together. I wish I could write down all I saw. I cannot tell you how the place looked. Two long trenches running nearly the whole length of the field alone. We walked over the trenches and discovered in one place an entire skull peering from an open hole. In another, a left hand. In another, two feet, and in another a whole body, save the head, was exposed. They were hastily buried, and the rain helped work away the little dirt thrown on them.” According to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, 160k men were engaged in total, with 60-90k horses & mules. In the end, 6 million pounds of human and animal carcass was left laying on the ground; 7-10k dead soldiers, & 7k dead horses. 20k wounded soldiers; no word on the number of wounded animals. Obviously, the role of animals has been given short shrift in the wars of the world.
Official Report for the 110th Pennsylvania. From Official Records, Series 1, Volume 27, Part 1
No. 157 – Report of Maj. Isaac Rogers, 110th Pennsylvania Infantry.
NEAR WARRENTON, VA., August 4, 1863.
SIR: I have the honor to report to Major-General Birney, through you, the part the One hundred and tenth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers took in the battle of Gettysburg, Pa., on July 2 and 3.
After arriving as far to the front as was deemed prudent, the regiment was moved off the road with the brigade in the edge of a woods to the right.
At 1p.m. Lieutenant-Colonel Jones, commanding regiment, was ordered by a staff officer to advance 50 paces and join the brigade on the right, under a heavy fire of artillery, which was done with much coolness. After getting established in this position, the skirmishers were driven back, when the general engagement commenced at 4 p.m.
Here Lieut. Col. David M. Jones was severely wounded, and the command of the regiment was given over to me. The battle continued with a determination on both sides to conquer or die until 6 p.m., when the enemy in our front fell back, and the order to cease firing was given. This being done, I was ordered by a staff officer to fall back and give the place to fresh troops, which was done, moving through apiece of woods, where the brigade was bivoucked for the night. Here my command was prepared for action on the following day.
Early on the morning of the 3d, I was ordered to move a short distance to the right, behind a piece of woods and near corps headquarters.
After being in this position forty minutes, I was ordered to take up a position on the same ground occupied by this regiment the day before, previous to going into action.
At 1 p.m. I was ordered to move forward to a stone fence. Soon after being in this position, I was ordered to change position, and was conducted to the right, behind a bettery, where I remained during the afternoon. The fire of the artillery was kept up all afternoon. The casualties in my command, though, were trifling, 2 men being slightly wounded.
At 8 p.m. I was ordered to move forward to act as a picket during the night, which was done. Here we remained until morning behind temporary earthworks.
My command behaved well during the two days’ battle, and as all did well and deserve praise, I will not particularly speak of any one.
Among the officers wounded was Lieut. Col. David M. Jones.
I am, sir, most respectfully, your obedient servant,
ISAAC ROGERS,
Major, Commanding Regiment.
ASSISTANT ADJUTANT GENERAL,
First Division, Third Army Corps.
Note: Lost Cause theories like some bones strewn around the vicinity of a grave, isolated bones, disarticulated, but leaned into each other trying to collect again.
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 13 “The Anatomy of the Myth.” Alan T. Nolan
“Leaders of such a catastrophe must account for themselves. Justification is necessary. Those who followed their leaders into the catastrophe required similar rationalization. Clement A. Evans, a Georgia veteran who are one time commanded the United Confederate Veterans organization, said this: “If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession, we will go down in History solely as a brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country.”
Note: Aaaaand yes, that’s what it was.
Americans Remember Their Civil War Barbara A. Gannon P. 8
“Former Confederate officials and other elite civilians needed to rationalize their actions that led to secession before the war, their failures during the war, and justify their elite status in the postwar era. Not surprisingly, former military leaders of the Confederate army played a prominent role in these efforts. Gary W. Gallagher in Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (1998) chronicled former Confederate major general Jubal Early’s “efforts to bequeath a written legacy favorable to Lee and Jackson and the nascent republic for which they fought.” According to Gallagher, “Early understood almost immediately after Appomattox that there would be a struggle to control the public memory of the war. He worked hard to help shape that memory and ultimately enjoyed more success than he probably imagined possible.” Early argued that “his Army of Northern Virginia set a standard of valor and accomplishment equal to anything in the military history of the Western world until finally, worn out but never defeated, they laid down their weapons at Appomattox.’”
Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 109 “The First Battle of Bull Run.” P.G.T. Beauregard, General, C.S.A.
“That one army was fighting for Union and the other disunion is a political expression; the actual fact on the battle-field, in the face of cannon and musket, was that the Federal troops came as invaders, and the Southern troops stood as defenders of their homes, and further than this we need not go.”
Note: Like scattered skeletal remains in decomposition, a body that has lost its soft tissue then gone to bones, then a body trying to rearticulate. Intoxication as excuse for losing:
Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Harold Holzer P. 479
THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG.
James Longstreet, Lieutenant-General, C.S.A.
“It has been reported that the troops attacking Marye’s Hill were intoxicated, having been plied with whisky to nerve them to the desperate attack. That can hardly be true. I know nothing of the facts, but no sensible commander will allow his troops strong drink upon going into battle. After a battle is over, the soldier’s gill is usually allowed if it is at hand. No troops could have displayed greater courage and resolution than was shown by those brought against Marye’s Hill. But they miscalculated the wonderful strength of the line behind the stone fence. The position held by Cobb surpassed courage and resolution, and was occupied by those who knew well how to hold a comfortable defense.
After the retreat, General Lee went to Richmond to suggest other operations, but was assured that the war was virtually over, and that we need not harass our troops by marches and other hardships. Gold had advanced in New York to two hundred, and we were assured by those at the Confederate capital that in thirty or forty days we would be recognized and peace proclaimed. General Lee did not share in this belief.”
Note: Jesus H. Christ, these men were so delusional, weren’t they? Truly a madness swept over the air of the South.
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 23 Quoting Beringer, Hattaway, Jones, and Still:
“No Confederate army lost a major engagement because of a lack of arms, munitions or other essential supplies. The North had the necessity to conquer. The South could have won simply by not being conquered. It did not have to occupy a foot of ground outside its own borders.”
The Civil War: The Complete Text of the Bestselling Narrative History of the Civil War– Based on the Celebrated PBS Television Series Ward, Ward, & Burns P. 234-235 Ken Burns interview with Shelby Foote
“Burns: “Did the South ever have a chance of winning?
Foote: I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back. At the same time the war was going on, the Homestead Act was being passed, all these marvelous inventions were going on. In the spring of 1864, the Harvard-Yale boat races were going on and not a man in either crew ever volunteered for the army or the navy. They didn’t need them. I think that if there had been more southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought out that other arm out from behind its back. I don’t think the South ever had a chance to win that war.
And things began to close in on them more and more. There was scarcely a family that hadn’t lost someone. There was disruption of society. The blockade was working. They couldn’t get very simple things like needles to sew with, very simple things. And the discouragement began to settle in more and more with the realization that they were not going to win that war. The political leaders did everything they could, especially Jefferson Davis, to assure them that this was the second American revolution and that if they would stand fast the way their forefathers had, victory was unquestionably going to come. But the realization came more and more that it was not going come. And especially that they were not going to get foreign recognition, without which we wouldn’t have won the first revolution. And all those things closed in on them. [With it came] a realization that defeat was foreordained. Mary Chesnut,** for instance, said, “It’s like a Greek tragedy, where you know what the outcome is bound to be. We’re living a Greek tragedy.”
Capitalism went spread-eagle and diversity went out of our life. I think that when the South was defeated to the extent that it was that the whole nation lost something when they lost that civilization, despite the enormous stain and sin of slavery.”
Note: “Democracy has failed because so many fear it. They believe that wealth and happiness are so limited that a world full of intelligent, healthy, and free people is impossible, if not undesirable. So the world stews in blood, hunger, and shame.” W.E.B. DuBois
The Past is a Foreign Country David Lowenthal P. 121-122
“Many older Americans retreated defensively into history. An exclusive WASP heritage, the Colonial past offered a perfect escape. The British heritage was no longer disparaged, early American became an offshoot of Old England, decently Protestant and charmingly quaint, the Revolution a temporary disruption of close fraternal bonds. The 1880s and 1890s saw the birth of scores of Sons, Daughters, Dames, and other commemorative genealogical societies, with Anglo-Saxon origins a sine qua non of membership.”
Deep South Paul Theroux P. 439-440
“Catastrophically passive, as though fatally wounded by the Civil War, the South has been held back from prosperity and has little power to exert influence on the country at large, so it remains immured in its region, especially in its rural areas, walled off from the world. I had not realized until I spent some time there how cruel it was that so many American companies had fled the South for other countries and taken the jobs with them; that the American philanthropists and charities, benevolently concerned with poverty around the world– was it for the acclaim? for the picturesque? for the tax benefit, for the photo op? for an escape from reality? – to bring teachers to Africa and food to India and medicine elsewhere; they had allowed the poor in the South, a growing peasant class, to die for lack of health care, and many to remain uneducated and illiterate and poorly housed, and some to starve. Though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest of the world in its failures.”
@DanRather August 5, 2021: “Oh. And while we’re rewriting American history might as well erase the whole Civil War. So uncomfortable and pretty much a buzzkill.” 41.6k
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 Eric Foner P. 609
“This rewriting of Reconstruction’s history was accorded scholarly legitimacy– to its everlasting shame– by the nation’s fraternity of professional historians. Early in the twentieth century a group of young Southern scholars gathered at Columbia University to study the Reconstruction era under the guidance of Professors John W. Burgess and William A. Dunning. Blacks, their mentors taught, were “children” utterly incapable of appreciating the freedom that had been thrust upon them. The North did “a monstrous thing” in granting them suffrage, for “a black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.” No political order in the South could survive unless founded on the principle of racial inequality. The students’ works on individual Southern states echoed these sentiments. Reconstruction, concluded the study of North Carolina, was an attempt by “selfish politicians, backed by the federal government… to Africanize the State and deprive the people through misrule and oppression of most that life held dear.” The views of the Dunning School shaped historical writing for generations, and achieved wide popularity through D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation….”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 205
“The national government made pension disbursements for Civil War dependents into the late 1980s. Alabama holds the distinction of being the last government authority to make a pension payment to a Civil War dependent, Alberta Martin, aged eighty-nine. At twenty-one, she had married Jasper Martin, then eighty-one. As a boy soldier, he served with the 4th Alabama in Virginia, 1864-65. Alberta received her final distribution in October 1996. Bill Clinton occupied the White House.”
Note: Other reports have Maudie Hopkins as the oldest, from Arkansas, died 2008. Last reports say a two other widowers still live in the South (TN. & N.C.), but choose to live in anonymity. 1939 laws in various states stated widows born after 1870 were not eligible for pensions. The last Southern vet– Pleasant Crump– dies in 1951, and the final Northern man– Albert Woolson– in 1956.
However, Irene Triplett dies in June, 2020, whom the Wall Street Journal named as the last person to receive a Civil War pension. She was raking in $73.13 per month because her father, of the 26th North Carolina, stayed behind in a Virginia hospital when his regiment of 800 (734 killed) marched up to Gettysburg. He switched sides, joining the 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry– Kirk’s Raiders– and was 83 when Irene was born. He spent his last years playing with his pet rattlesnakes, sitting on his front porch with a shotgun. He died just days after attending the 1938 Gettysburg reunion. Irene began chewing tobacco in 1st grade. She died at 90, her father at 92. The Sons of Union Veterans “….will, as is customary, declare a 30-day mourning period. Members will wear a black band on their membership badges.” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2020 Michael Phillips
Note: The Sixth Corps is sometimes left off maps of Gettysburg on July 3 because publishers have supposed limited resources & room on maps, which affects the narrative around Pickett’s Charge & how it’s deconstructed, according to mapmaker Edward Alexander: “So many Gettysburg maps portray Pickett’s Charge as going toward a thin blue line atop Cemetery Ridge, omitting the packed U.S. reserves as if to beckon the reader to pretend the attack might possibly succeed. Good luck even finding the Sixth Corps– the largest, freshest and in my opinion the best at fighting in the Army of the Potomac– on many cartographic depictions of day three. There sometimes just isn’t room for a bunch of cannon symbols on a larger scope map. But showing Pickett’s Charge going just into a line of infantry significantly downplays the folly of the assault. Still better at least than the artistic visualizations of Pickett’s Charge. Miss me with the whole implication of “whoever wins this spot, wins the war” nonsense.” Pickett’s Charge like a conga line. This was a murder. This was not any accident. He reccommends the book “How to Lie with Maps” by Mark Monmonier. (@makemeamapllc. 7/3/21)
As well: In case you’re not aware (I certainly wasn’t), Mercator maps grossly distort land & sea masses. Arthur C. Clarke: “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly ocean.” Mercator maps are common, but they exceedingly distort; for instance, accurate continent sizes. A Mercator map will have Greenland the same size as South America, but it is over eight times larger. And the Pacific ocean covers over half of Earth– 63 million square miles– meaning all continents could fit inside it. Lots of space to set up a corporation on an island that doesn’t exist. And Africa is huge– inside that could go China, Brazil, & the United States; in fact, the Africa is 14 times larger than the U.S. Yet the maps we most often see strangely situate America straight in the center. Gotta keep that colonizer game going, the sound of screaming from Earth that can be heard from space, that vacuum in space where sound is swallowed before long at the highest layer through the different colors of space as you go higher & higher in the atmosphere & end up mute. Earth formed out of space debris, after all. Space debris.
Note: Pension fraud was a widespread issue in the South after the war. See Domby in The False Cause, Chapter 3, “The Loyal Deserters: Confederate Pension Fraud in Civil War Memory, 1901-1940.”
Last: By the third round, or day, it was down to, or up to, 50 thousand casualties, & more than 1/3 of Lee’s army annihilated. 28,063 the Confederacy lost. They said Gettysburg was a pox on all houses. Meade doesn’t bother to pursue, a fact much criticized. After Gettysburg, it’s said thousands of deserters started “pouring back” to their states. North Carolina deserters came back & whole counties became anti-war & draft dodgers. But today, wagons were hightailing it south, & according to Shelby Foote, ordered not to stop for any reason, day or night. Foote quotes a man there who relays the brutality of the situation inThe Stars in their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, P. 270: “Many of the injured men had been without food for thirty-six hours, he later wrote, and their “torn and bloody clothing, matted and hardened, was rasping and tender, inflamed, and still oozing wounds. Very few of the wagons had even a layer of straw in them, and all were without springs….From From nearly every wagon as the teams trotted on, urged by whip and shout, came such cries and shrieksas these: ‘Oh, God! Why can’t I die?’ ‘My God, will no one have mercy and kill me?’ ‘Stop! Oh, for God’s sake, stop just for one minute; take me out and let me die on the roadside!’ ‘I am dying, I am dying!’….During this one night,” the cavalryman added, “I realized more of the horrors of war than I had in all the two proceeding years.”
Bypassing Chambersburg in the darkness, the lead escort regiment rode through Greencastle at dawn, and when the troopers were a mile beyond the town, which had offered no resistance at all in the course of the march north the week before, some thirty or forty citizens rushed out of their houses and “attacked the train with axes, cutting the spokes out of ten or a dozen wheels and dropping the wagons in the streets.’”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 258-259
“The battle was a tactical draw, but a technical victory for the Union as the Confederates vacated the field, crossing the Potomac while McClellan congratulated himself on “saving the Union.” The Army of the Potomac allowed Lee to escape without pursuit. McClellan’s army was exhausted. The day was exceedingly hot, and the close combat blanketed the battlefield with smoke, making breathing difficult. Many soldiers had temporarily lost all or part of their hearing. The artillery fire rumbled down from the hills like peals of thunder that never ceased. The powdery smoke, laced with saltpeter, burned the noses, throats, and eyes of the soldiers, who left the field, if they could, with tears streaming down their faces. A Union soldier wrote, “So terrible has been the day; so rapid and confused the events, that I find it impossible to separate them, so as to give, or even to form for myself any clear idea of what I have seen.’”
Note: Bodies were still being found in 1996. They’re out there as I write this. But from 1872-1873, women were in charge of relocating 3 thousand dead Confederate men up out of the ground to new ground (south of the ever-present Mason-Dixon), to places like the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg (in the “Confederate section”), or in the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. But these remains had no face. No name. Nothing.
I saw Helemieman Rev Shidler….
This is as North as the South ever got. Has that end-of-the-world feel to it. That ain’t sport, that’s slaughter. 46-51k casualties and Lee loses 1/3rd his army. At some point the living forget their living & the dead forget their dead. It’s all a matter of time.
3,200 Union killed, 5,400 missing or captured. 14,500 wounded; Rebels: 4,700 killed, 5,900 wounded, 5,900 missing or captured. 8k on both sides dead right then or a bit later, not that anyone could keep close track.
This, though. Meade lets ’em get away. He elongates the war like a Chinese serpent on a dish of chowmein. Chin Chin!
The dark shook the rain loose from the sky in the night that separates the two days when they turn tail, leaving 7,000 wounded men behind in the rain. They got off their mark fast to trek home despite 10k being barefoot, & the trailing of 50k cattle, 50k sheep, countless hogs, mules, plus 20k horses. But on the way across the Mason-Dixon both ways, Confederates abducted about 4k free Black Pennsylvanians. Maryland they gathered them up then returned them to former owners, kept them, or sold them. Imprisonment, auction, or enslavement. One statistic is 1,000. Another 4,000. Another 10k. Another estimate: Lee’s wagon train was from 17-57 miles long by July 3. God knows. Right? Paging God?
“It is all my fault” Lee tells his men when he rides onto the field right after. Pickett never forgives Lee. Foote called it “The mistake of all mistakes.” Basically a snuff film, were they able to Panavision that shit. Civil War Trust has a YouTube video of this charge, not of course the original charge, but. Before fighting resumed on this third day, the total for both sides was already 35k casualties. Meade was the first General to defeat Lee. Some say Lee said Pickett’s Charge never would have happened because Jackson would have taken the ground before Ewell ever got the chance.
Today, Union soldiers repeatedly chant “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” at Pickett’s Charge when Rebels get within about 200 yards. They get to The Angle, at the wall, they get to one part of the wall, and it devolves to hand-to-hand. “That was as far north as the south ever got, & they lost that battle, & they lost that war.” Shelby Foote
Note: July 3, 1863, the 110th supported batteries on Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg. 12,500 Confederates were on Cemetery Ridge (Pickett’s Charge). This was 150 guns going off for two hours bombarding the Union line. Then the Union line shot back with about 150, so that made it 300 all at once. Half the participants were killed or wounded today at the charge. Lee orders the bombardment at 1pm. Meade responds, then the largest artillery bombardment in the Western hemisphere commences. It’s the South’s second attempt at taking land north of the Mason Dixon. Now these are Pennsylvanians on their own land and they’re pissed. Pissed at those southern southron southerners. Tim Smith, Gettysburg Park battlefield guide: “I don’t think it’s that close. I think that over the years just for the purpose of drama we have tended to make it appear as if the Southern Army is almost breaking through the Union line and oh they’re just driven back the last moment. No, it was not, not even close. This charge was a disaster from the beginning and heavy losses coming across that open field uh only a few of ’em reached the area. It was not close.” And he noted that Rebels aimed too high so the missiles went over Union heads. Last, Major General Alexander Hays and staff rode down the line, dragging captured Rebel flags through the dirt after them. Imagine the sight of that.
The Generals of Gettysburg: the Leaders of America’s Greatest Battle Larry Tagg P. Not found on google, so sorry.
“‘When the smoke cleared, Hays, who was unhurt but had lost two horses shot out from under him, kissed his aide in the exhilaration of the moment, grabbed a captured battle flag and rode down the division’s line, dragging it in the dirt behind his horse while waving his hat and exhorting the men to cheer. The moment was so exciting, his aide wrote later, “My horse seemed to be off the ground traveling through the air.” General Hancock praised Hays’ conduct as “all that could be desired in a division commander.”
1913: 50th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg: 3 days & everyone’s friends now in a presumption, a stagily presented dual innocence play date, potato salad, a background of set-bound melodramas for an already future Sunday night Heart of Dixie flick, a nostalgia for paradise lost, the future a derivatively bad Gray Ghost series & the Marx Blue and Gray Plastic Soldiers Play Set, tiny toy rifles, weapons with no slapback shoulder bruise the shape of South Carolina & when the trigger goes on & on &c.
The first full-scale Pickett’s Charge renactment was July, 1998. On the 3rd day, 32k uniformed, let’s call them cosplayers, participated. It was bigger than the original Pickett’s Charge. 1998, the 135th anniversary, & 30k showed, plus 50k spectators.
The one photograph everyone knows– the aftermath of Gettysburg– where the men rest dead on what’s left of the grass before post-haste burials; the one soldier foregrounded, head pointed toward the viewer, a funhouse dummy but not, mouth gaping open like a pufferfish, that O-ring mouth hanging open, the dark in his mouth for all to see: “Harvest of Death,” taken July 5, 1863. These aren’t the men showing up in American Battlefield Trust’s* yearly twitter clip, with the mistaken “1939” header, one minute twenty one seconds of North & South converging yet again on Gettysburg in 1913, 1938. 50K Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans on the 50th anniversary; 10k were of the Confederate Army. By the 75th, 1938, the average age is 94, & 1,900-2,500 will gather of the 8k still alive, & of those, 25 were Gettysburg vets, & grasp hands across the wall, & the Paramount newsreel gets one man howling for the camera, who then says, That’s the Rebel yell. A woman walks around pinning flowers to their lapels. Then they all gather at a long table for a feast, heads bent low to it, shoveling food in. The footage ends with Seventy-five years have gone since Gettysburg, where 43,000 Americans were killed and wounded. For the last time, now the few survivors join hands… Blue and Gray together. The wound has healed. This will be the last official gathering of Gettysburg veterans. Glory Glory Hallelujah plays in the background, too coldly choreographed, the youngest there clutching American flags stapled to balsa sticks, & Teddy Roosevelt talks immortal deeds and immortal words next to a memorial unveiled with a gigantic American Flag. Thankful that they stand together under one flag now. The “climax” when both sides reenact Pickett’s Charge. These aren’t the ones on the field in a photo cracked & creased, in a photo torn apart, the young round bloated face like a pufferfish, as if lip-synching to someone’s national anthem he can’t quite get the words out to, shaping some over-enunciated vowels in the horror vacui of leftover gift wrap in the shadow of a Southern monument.
*A preservation society criticized for its pro-Confederate orientation.
See: The American Civil War Sesquintennial Web Archive at the Library of Congress. This 200 plus website collection marks the 150th anniversary that happened 2011-2015.
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