BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
The 150th Anniversary of one of the most important events in American history and arguably in world history slipped past the public consciousness July 3, without much attention or appreciation.
The event was the Battle of Gettysburg, actually a series of the most bloody battles of the Civil War that occurred just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, beginning with Picket’s Charge up Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 1, 1863, and ending with the retreat of the Confederate Army under the command of General Robert E. Lee in the early morning hours of Independence Day, July 4.
The great events of history always offer us valuable opportunities to learn and relearn, to reconnect with our past, to reassess our course, and to renew our dedication to principle and values. These events most of all.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to revisit Gettysburg was lost in the din of other events of far less importance and consequence, with the possible exception of the peaceful overthrow of the Egyptian government, which may be of profound consequence.
It is a sign of our times, for example, that the anniversary of Gettysburg was eclipsed in our public discourse by the trial of George Zimmerman who killed a black man in a gated community in Florida. Zimmerman’s trial, as it turns out is not so much about race as some thought, and may be reflective of reverse discrimination, but that hasn’t curtailed the coverage of it.
The Washington Post featured the Zimmerman trial on Page 1 on July 3, the anniversary of the most important events at Gettysburg. There was not one mention of the battles.
The next day, July 4, the Post demonstrated again that the First Amendment protections of the press may have been a waste of good parchment. The editorial writers ignored the most important outcome of Gettysburg and the Civil War, the preservation of the Union. They were somehow fixated on the days preceding the battles when the Confederate Army “rounded up black people wherever they found them, with little regard for whether they were free or escaped slaves.” The Post incredulously concluded that the “sesquicentennial today is a noteworthy reminder that such things once happened on U.S. soil and were accepted by many.”
The story of Gettysburg is much more than a noteworthy reminder. The story is worth telling and retelling, learning and relearning because those battles and those that followed were about slavery, of course, but much more than that. They put a price on the value of our union and the sacrifices that have been made to keep the union together, to govern ourselves for the good of all, not just to the benefit of our parochial interests, or our community or our states.
George Will got it right. He wrote on June 30th: “But as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, the war’s ultimate purpose was to preserve the Union in order to prove democracy’s viability. ‘Unless the Union was restored,’ (historian Allen C) Guelzo says, ‘there would be no practical possibility of emancipation…’”
And so did Edward Everett, the former Congressman, Governor, Senator, and Secretary of State who gave the keynote address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National cemetery on the Gettysburg battlefield four months after the guns had been silenced.
Everett spoke for two hours. He reminded the throng of 15,000 that: “The bonds that united us as one People…these bonds of union are of perennial force and energy, while the causes of alienation are imaginary, factitious and transient. The heart of the people, North and South, is for the Union.”
Lincoln said the same, more eloquently in just over two minutes, interrupted by applause three times, according to the New York Times account (Lincoln’s famous address is below).
The battles of Gettysburg were fought over those three days on places like Seminary Ridge, the Peach Orchard, and Round Top just outside Gettysburg, PA, a town of just under 3,000 inhabitants. Some of the decisive battles were fought on July 3, 1863. By the early morning of July 4th, when Lee and what was left of his Confederate Army marched South in retreat behind him were some 28,000 dead comrades. Union casualties were 23,000. Nearly 30,000 were wounded. In three days there were almost as many American dead as there were during the entirety of the Vietnam War.
Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. It was the seminal moment of the war, a transformational event for the country and even for the world at the time.
Throughout the Civil War, nearly 400,000 Americans died on battlefields from Pennsylvania to Georgia and the Carolinas to Kansas. But the number of dead doesn’t begin to tell the tale of horror.
A way of life, an economic system, a social and moral structure, a culture were all buried forever. The wrenching changes, the physical and psychological devastation, the corruption, all of the horrors of civil war required economic and civil reconstruction that took America into its next century. You could make the case that social and political reconstruction continues to this day.
The Civil War reaffirmed in perpetuity that there can be no individual liberty, no civic authority, no state sovereignty unless the Union is secure and governed well.
It is fitting that the anniversary of Gettysburg falls in the week of the anniversary—the 237th—of the birth of the Union, July 4, 1776. While our experiment in self-government faltered before the Federal Republic was finally formed in 1789, it was inevitable from the moment we declared independence, a nation as vast as ours could not survive without the states united under one flag and one form of government.
You would think we wouldn’t need to be reminded of those basic precepts of American governance, but we do every day in a capital city where at one end of the avenue an American President is busy breeding a socialistic, imperial presidency and at the other a small cadre of modern-day anarchists is intimidating an entire Congress into submission to a state of dysfunction.
The two ends of the avenue fight each other, conflict with each other, and nullify each other as though the lessons of the past, the sacrifices of the past were unique to their own time. They act as though the past is not prologue, it isn’t even relevant.
When you look back 150 years or 237 years ago today and think about political leadership and governance today, you have to wonder why we haven’t learned more; why we don’t appreciate more of the past, why our leaders are not humbled by the deeds of those who preceded them, and therefore more dedicated to the concept of Union.
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From the New York Times, 1863:
“The President then delivered the following dedicatory speech:
“Fourscore and seven years ago our Fathers brought forth upon this Continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. [Applause.] Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. [Applause.] The world will little note nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. [Applause.] It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the refinished work that they have thus so far nobly carried on. [Applause.] It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; [applause] that the Nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom, and that Governments of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth, [Long continued applause.]
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From A News Correspondent
“Gettysburgh, Friday, July 3
“The experience of all the tried and veteran officers of the Army of the Potomac tells of no such desperate conflict as has been in progress during this day. The cannonading of Chancelorsville, Malvern and Manassas were pastimes compared with this.
“While I write the ground about me is covered thick with rebel dead, mingled with our own. Thousands of prisoners have been sent to the rear, and yet the conflict still continues.
“The losses on both sides are heavy. Among our wounded officers are Hancock, Gibbon and a great many others whose names I feel restrained from publishing without being assured that they are positively in the list of casualties.
“It is near sunset. Our troops hold the field, with many rebel prisoners in their hands. The enemy has been magnificently repulsed for three days – repulsed on all sides- most magnificently to-day. Every effort made by him since Wednesday morning to penetrate Meade’s lines has been foiled. The final results of the action, I hope to be able to give you at a later hour this evening.”
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.