Road Trip Through History: Gettysburg National Military Park
Our recent trip to Gettysburg was a blast, and not just because I love to stand up in front of a crowd and talk about something I’m interested in.
If you get a chance to visit Gettysburg National Military Park during the annual Sacred Trust event,* take it. The event is well-organized. Speakers start and stop with a military precision that the commanders at the battle would have envied. More important, the organizers choose speakers on a broad range of topics. Some of the talks are what I think of as technical military history: the nitty-gritty of battles and troop movements. But history buffs who are not particularly interested in descriptions of troop movements will also find subjects of interest. This year’s program included talks on
• Charles Anderson, the poor schmuck who spoke after Lincoln
• Whether Robert E. Lee actually committed treason
• The relationship of Nat Turner’s slave revolt to the Civil War three decades later
• A history of Gettysburg as a park
• The transformation of American medicine as a result of the war
• Some nerd talking about Civil War nurses–who would have thought?
(Makes you wish you’d been there, doesn’t it?)
Even if you can’t get to Gettysburg for the Sacred Trust, the park is well worth a visit. Here were some of the things I recommend:
1. Hire a battlefield guide. Official battlefield guides are more than just local fanatics. They are local fanatics who have been trained, tested, and licensed by the park service. Each one approaches the story a little differently. Most will ask you if there is something in particular that you’re interested in. A two-hour tour is $65 for a carload of one to six people, plus a tip. And a bargain at the price.
2. The excellent film, A New Birth of Freedom, narrated by Morgan Freeman. One of the things that impressed me most about the film (as well as audio portions in the museum) is that they didn’t give in to the temptation to have Freeman read Lincoln’s lines. Instead Lincoln’s words were spoken by an actor who gave him the authentic thin, twangy sound that made cultured Northeasterners grind their teeth when he first opened his mouth. My favorite line from the film? “Freedom, like power, is never uncontested.”
3. The cyclorama! I’ve written about the Gettysburg Cyclorama before, but I’d never seen it. No photograph can do it justice. The restored painting is amazing as it stands. Combined with light and sound, the experience is astonishing. The figures appear three-dimensional and the smoke, painted with flecks of tinsel, seems to move.
4. The museum does an excellent job of placing the battle in the larger context of the war: from the build up to the war through to its aftermath. The curators have chosen wonderful images and great quotations to illustrate their points. I love the way they use blue and grey throughout the exhibition, giving the viewer a subtle clue as to whether a particular point deals with north and south. But I did not linger. In part because there was lots of competing audio and video, which I find physically unpleasant. But in part because I’ve been immersed so deeply in the Civil War for the last year that it was too familiar to hold my interest.** My guess is I’d have gone through it more thoroughly if I’d been there two years ago.
5. If you’re at Gettysburg on a summer weekend, take the shuttle bus to the George Spangler Farm Civil War Hospital, which is run by the Gettysburg Foundation in conjunction with the park. The Foundation hosts reenactment groups and offers living history programs on both civilian farm life at the time of the war and the realities of Civil War medicine.
Gettysburg National Military Park, and in fact all of the National Battlefields and National Military Parks I’ve visited over the years, commemorate war without romanticizing it. As should we all.
*Scheduled each July to coincide with the anniversary of the battle.
**I keep thinking I’ll set the subject down for a while, but it just keeps nudging me. If you’re suffering from Civil War fatigue, Dear Readers, please let me know.
Choosing (Historical) Sides
Recently a friend of mine texted me from Culloden in Scotland*–the battlefield where the Duke of Cumberland routed Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite forces and effectively ended the Jacobite cause. (Charles was later involved in a half-hearted French plan to invade England in 1759, but it came to naught.) She wanted to know if I wanted a Jacobite blue bonnet.
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- William of Orange (aka William III)
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- Bonnie Prince Charlie
My answer–which didn’t surprise her–was no. Despite the fact that the exiled Stuarts clearly had the better legal right to the throne, I’ve always had a soft-spot for that hard-working sober-minded prince, William of Orange. And I’ve never had much use for Bonnie Prince Charlie–who I’ve always thought of as a putz rather than a failed romantic hero. (If you have strong opinions on the subject, feel free to yell at me in the comments below.)
Karin’s offer of a Jacobite blue bonnet led me to think about the fact that history buffs tend to chose sides. Sometimes it is because we agree with one side’s political position. Sometimes it’s because we have a family connection to one side of a conflict or a vested interest in the outcome. Sometimes it’s simply a question of who won. (Though Lost Causes also have their supporters.***)
And sometimes it simply comes down to preferring one historical figure over another. In my graduate school days, classes on Victorian England quickly divided themselves into two camps on the question of who was the greatest Prime Minister of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli or William Gladstone. The members of Team Disraeli and Team Gladstone all had good solid arguments supporting their guy, but when you pushed them it eventually came down to a question of personality.****
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- Benjamin Disraeli
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- William Gladstone
Choosing sides isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as you realize you have a preference. In the end, no one writes objective history.
So tell me, oh Marginalia, what historical sides have you chosen and why?
*Not quite as exciting as the time she called me from Tipu Sultan’s palace at Seringapatam.** While I occasionally grumble about feeling like my cell phone is a leash, there is something pretty cool about getting instant communication from far flung historical sites.
**Checking back for an old post to link to, I discover that while I have written about Tipu’s Tiger here on the Margins I have not yet written about Tipu. An oversight that will be rectified.
***Which brings us back to Bonnie Prince Charlie. I have to give the man credit for persistence.
Sir Robert Peel
****Me? I vote for Robert Peel. Call me contrary.
Word With a Past: Shoddy
In the early nineteenth century British textile manufacturers began to recycle woolen rags into a an inexpensive woolen cloth. The rags were shredded into fibers, mixed with new wood, and then spun and woven into the cloth, which was known as “shoddy”–a term that may have come from an old word meaning divide.* The process was such a success that wool rags for the textile mills were collected all over Britain. For several decades, shipments of rags even arrived from continental Europe.
Civil war soldier
By the mid-nineteenth century, shoddy was exported to North America in large quantities, where it was available in the American Civil War when the need for Army uniforms put wool cloth from the New England textile mills at a premium. Some clothiers, most notably Brooks Brothers,** used shoddy instead of wool to make uniforms and blankets for the Union Army. (I assume this was war profiteering rather than sabotage.) Some soldiers complained that the uniforms melted to rags in the rain.
As the war went on, profiteering and graft ran rampant. Contractors sold the army tins of spoiled meat, boots with soles made from glued together wood chips*** and unserviceable rifles. The material from which inferior uniforms was made became a description for every piece of second-rate, badly made material that was foisted off on the Army.**** The contractors who made a killing on supplying the war were given the derisive nickname “the shoddy aristocracy.”
Shoddy. adj. Made of inferior material .Cheap, inferior, shabby, dilapidated.
*An etymology I offer with hesitation, as does the OED.
**I was shocked.
***Try marching in those.
****Probably with the connivance of a quartermaster or steward on the take. Graft happened at both ends of the supply chain.