Gettysburg on CNN.com

[william42]

This story is from June 28 '04, just before the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.


Clash comes to symbolize Civil War

July 1-3, 1863: Battle of Gettysburg

By Greg Botelho
CNN


(CNN) -- As the Civil War made a rare foray into the North, residents of the small southern Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg buzzed with excitement in summer 1863 and jockeyed for the best vista to watch the approaching Confederate and Union armies.
This energized atmosphere was quickly dashed by the harsh reality of war. Described as the "work of the very devil himself" by one Union bugler, the Gettysburg battle on July 1-3 ended with 51,000 casualties -- an astonishing total given that about 165,000 troops on both sides participated.
"The noise above our heads, the rattling of musketry, the screeching of shells and the unearthly yells, added to the cries of the children, were enough to shake the stoutest heart," Gettysburg native and witness Elizabeth Salome "Sally" Myers recalled decades later.
The battle not only transformed Gettysburg -- which initially teemed with wounded and dead bodies and is now a living monument to the fight -- but it helped to decide the Civil War and, in turn, the future of the United States.
"Gettysburg proved a significant turning point in the war, and therefore in the preservation of the United States and abolition of slavery," said James McPherson, a Princeton professor and one of the nation's top Civil War experts. "The Civil War ended lingering doubts since its conception about whether the United States would survive."
Close to home

Subsequent wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have taken place far from U.S. soil, with a relatively small percentage of Americans engaging in combat.
The Civil War, by contrast, occurred exclusively in America's backyards, towns, farms and roads. Union and Confederate soldiers often had similar backgrounds -- in many cases, relatives fought one another on the battlefield -- and their generals had studied at the same schools and employed many of the same military strategies.
Few corners of America were left untouched. Some three-quarters of able Southern white males and about half of capable men in the North joined their respective armies, most all of them as combat soldiers, a troop mobilization rate well above that in any other U.S. war. About 620,000 soldiers -- 2 percent of the U.S. population in the 1860s -- were killed.
"The Civil War was America's only total war -- its single greatest traumatic event," said Craig Symonds, a history professor for the last 29 years at the U.S. Naval Academy. "It was omnipresent in ways that other wars were not."
Some describe today's political climate as among the most divisive in U.S. history, but it pales compared to the strong feelings that divided many in the more rural, hierarchical and traditional South and the more industrial, entrepreneurial and egalitarian North.
"The polarization and animosity were far deeper on the eve of the Civil War than it's ever been," said McPherson. "The 'red state-blue state' divisions of today [referring to the 2000 presidential election where maps denoted in blue states that backed Democrat Al Gore and in red for Republican George W. Bush] or the cultural wars over abortion, gay rights or other issues are far more superficial than the events of the 1850s."
Pivotal battle

The Confederacy scored several successes early in the Civil War, particularly in the East -- where most Americans, and thus public attention, were concentrated -- as Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia dominated the Union's Army of the Potomac.
Lee chose to invade the North in part to relieve pressure on Confederate Virginia and draw Union troops from the Western front, where General Ulysses S. Grant's forces looked set to end the Confederacy's grip on the Mississippi River. Lee also hoped to strike a psychological blow in the North before the 1864 elections to stimulate the peace movement and sap support from Republicans, the party of President Abraham Lincoln, which firmly backed the war and opposed the spread of slavery.
"If you're ambivalent about slavery, at this point you might think, 'Just let the South have its independence,'" said Gettysburg National Military Park historian Scott Hartwig of some Northerners' mindsets prior to the Gettysburg battle. "The war is hanging in the balance."
While the Gettysburg battle was not a rout, the Union rejoiced after holding its ground in the face of several fierce, and nearly successful, Confederate thrusts.
"The battle made many Northerners think that the war is winnable, dispelling the myth that Lee [and his army] was invincible," said Hartwig.
Intense, back-and-forth fighting continued for two years. Yet Lee's pullout from Gettysburg marked the last time he seized the initiative and attacked the North, as Confederate forces generally spent the rest of the war reacting to Union advances into their territory.
Gettysburg's growing significance

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, made four months after the battle, clarified the war's mission to save the union, and also to return the nation to ideals spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. He stressed that the United States was "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" -- a reference to the need to end slavery.
The speech was widely disseminated soon after it was made, boosting the effort to recommit Union troops, but it did not attain its legendary status until decades later.
Fifty years after the battle, Gettysburg hosted the largest Civil War reunion with more than 50,000 Union and Confederate veterans filling a 280-acre camp. The event helped shift the town's legacy as not only a site of vast death and destruction, but also of national reconciliation.
"These venerable men crowding here to this famous field have set us a great example of devotion and utter sacrifice," President Woodrow Wilson said on July 4, 1913. "But their task is done."
Early and continued efforts to preserve the battlefield -- making Gettysburg not just a historical site, but a tourist destination -- have further boosted the clash's significance.
The number of visitors to Gettysburg National Military Park has soared 60 percent in the last 20 years. In 2003, 1.8 million people visited the park's nearly 6,000 acres. It features 26 miles of roads; a cemetery with 7,000 interments; a museum of 38,000 artifacts; and more than 1,400 monuments, markers and memorials.
"Interest in the Civil War is at an all-time high," said McPherson. "The government starves the Park Service for resources, but [Gettysburg National Military Park] is the best place to go to learn about the Civil War."
While many visitors do not fully realize the "very complex, very violent and very tragic" nature of the Civil War, said Hartwig, the park's 70 permanent and 28 seasonal staff members work to explain not only how the battle and war was fought, but why.
"We knew that there was a problem [of how to deal with slavery] that had to go away, but great statesmen had tried and failed to resolve it," said Symonds of the war's importance. "The Civil War was an essential conflict about whether or not this experiment in self-government and democracy would persevere."

[texascavcadet]

very intristing!!! I hope they "air" that every year!!