September 25, 2008
Museum Review
Renewed Vantage at Center of Battle
By
EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — If you stand on Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg National Military Park and gaze out at the pastoral expanse of fields bounded by wooden fences and low stone walls, you see a copse of trees to your left, some scant woods in the far distance and, miles away, a few verdant hills. Only widely spaced statues and monuments alongside the road and reproductions of cannons near the ridge recall what happened here seven score and five years ago.
But there is another view of this same panorama. Only here the paved roads are dirt paths; the cannons are firing; dead horses and the bodies of men are strewn in the dirt; and thousands of soldiers are charging with bayonets or raised swords. There is no refuge from the smoke, blood and tumult. Wherever you turn there are men fighting or dying or prepared to do both.
You need to see both views to begin to make sense of what happened here on July 3, 1863. The first, with its glimpses of war landmarks like Little Round Top, is the result of more than a century-long effort to preserve the 6,000-acre Gettysburg battlefield by the
National Park Service (now joined by the nonprofit Gettysburg Foundation in more rigorously restoring it to its 1863 condition).
The second one, which is returning to public view on Friday after a five-year, $15 million restoration, is an enormous oil painting of the battle between Gen.
Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Gen. George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac, completed in the 1880s by the French painter Paul Philippoteaux and a team of assistants. A generation after the conflict Philippoteaux spoke to veterans, sketched period artifacts, studied battle maps and photographs and toured the site. The result was a cyclorama, a popular 19th-century predecessor of Imax or surround sound: the viewer stands at the center of an epic scene.
The history of this painting is surveyed in a new book, “The ‘Battle of Gettysburg’ Cyclorama,” by Sue Boardman and Kathryn Porch. It had originally been displayed here in its own building. But as part of the Park Service’s restoration that building — like the old visitor center — is scheduled for demolition.
The painting is now mounted in a new $103 million visitor center, which includes an impressive 24,000-square-foot Gettysburg Museum of the American Civil War that opened in April and surveys not only the three days of battle here, but also the war and its impact. The cyclorama is meant to serve as an introduction to the battlefield. But it also stands — or rather (at 12.5 tons) hangs — on its own: this 377-foot-long, 42-foot-high painting is stunning.
After an introductory film about the war, you ascend to the viewing space, a circular room resembling a planetarium. Yet the interest isn’t what lies overhead, but what wraps around. You first see the cyclorama by emerging into it. You feel that you are intruding, disrupting something primal. At first you see only the fog of battle: clotted groups haphazardly assaulting one another. But a sound-and-light narrative illuminates events with the discernment of a general.
Lee had confidently invaded the North with the hope of so weakening Union forces that he could end the war. But after two days of clashes around Gettysburg in which lost opportunities, extraordinary bravery and unbelievable stupidity were shared by all, Lee felt stymied. On the third day he hoped to win by weakening the Union forces with an extended onslaught of cannon fire and then sending some 13,000 soldiers charging out of the woods toward the center of the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge, not far from where the painting’s viewers stand.
This attack (later known as Pickett’s Charge) was both daring and foolhardy, particularly since so much Confederate cannon fire overshot its targets. Looking out at the three-quarters of a mile of exposed field from the Union-held ridge you can imagine the Confederates being picked off by cannons, muskets and rifles. But looking at the painting, you also see how many Confederates broke through and how high the price was for their defeat. A monument erected in the copse toward which the Confederate troops pressed marks the ****hest point Lee’s forces reached. That penetration is portrayed in the cyclorama and memorialized as the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy.” After this the tide shifted: the North never came so near to defeat, the South never came so close to victory.
This is one reason that Gettysburg has such resonance, and why, when the Union dead were disinterred from mass graves and placed in a Soldiers’ National Cemetery nearby,
Lincoln came to consecrate the ground, reading his Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863. The Union victory didn’t end the war, which continued for almost two more years, but it shattered Lee’s invasion and sent him home in retreat. Had the battle gone the other way, the war’s outcome might have been different.
Lincoln’s address recognized this, and perhaps the Union’s near-death experience helped him clarify the issues. The museum names its galleries with phrases from the address, and devotes one to its complete recitation. This weekend, in honor of the cyclorama unveiling, one of five known manuscripts will be displayed.
The museum can even be seen as an attempt to explain the address’s allusions: What was this “great civil war” Lincoln spoke of? (An exhibition traces its origins in the different cultures of North and South and emphasizes the role slavery played.)
What happened on the “great battlefield of that war”? (Short films and maps outline each day’s battles.)
And why did Lincoln stress how important it was to ensure that “these dead shall not have died in vain”? Partly because what everyone knew at the time: An enormous price was paid. In three days of fighting there were more than 51,000 casualties. After one battle a witness said: “The dead literally covered the ground. The blood stood in puddles on the rocks.”
Afterward a witness described “one vast hospital, miles in extent.” Another described the “pestilential stench of decaying humanity” that filled the town.
If the dead did not die in vain, it was because the Union eventually won. That is what the address and the battlefield proclaim. Yet a peculiar tension exists here.
(Italics from here to end are mine. Many of these issues below, especially, have been addressed to some great length on this board.) Over the last century the tendency has been to make commemorations more civil than the war ever was. The exhibition celebrates the Union, but after its opening discussion of slavery it avoids condemning the Confederacy. In this it follows a tendency that began after the war’s 50th anniversary, as once-Confederate states began to raise monuments here. After all, aren’t the enemy’s dead also the nation’s?
But then how are an enemy’s casualties — those who died in vain — to be consecrated? After Lincoln’s address two decades passed before the Confederate’s dead were disinterred; they were buried in the South — not at the “national cemetery” here.
Consider this a still-raw scar from the Civil War, a paradox in which the defeated have become part of the Union being celebrated. But I cannot think of another place where contending forces and their impact on American history can be so strongly felt. If the Civil War was the first national trauma that touched every citizen and defined, with Lincoln’s guidance, the nature of American aspiration, then Gettysburg is the first American shrine.
So almost two million visitors come here every year, seeking understanding through the shock of accumulated details — work aided by the cyclorama. The museum tells of Lt. Bayard Wilkeson, a 19-year-old Union soldier who, wounded after leading a charge, amputated his shattered leg with a penknife; he died that day.
Three days later, Samuel Wilkeson, covering the conflict for The New York Times, reported, “Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of important interest — the dead body of an oldest born?”
The dead lieutenant he came upon was his son.
The restored cyclorama is on view starting Friday at the Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center in Pennsylvania; (717) 334-1124.
Respectfully,
Leland
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Cleaning up the Cyclorama 
As I remember it when I was there in '87 I don't see how it could have been improved upon as it was then. 
Linear Mode
