Gettysburg Regress

Last winter, I was walking with my wife along Seminary Ridge on the

Gettysburg battlefield when an odd detail drew into sight: piles of

felled trees, stacked alongside a road. The cuts smelled as fresh

as the trees looked strong. What happened to them, we wondered? I

grew up in Gettysburg, and my mother still lives in the shadow of

Lutheran Theological Seminary, low in the lap of the ridge it

names. Seminary Ridge is one of a string of ridges surrounding the

town; General Robert E. Lee stood there on July 2 and 3, 1863. The

woods atop the ridge had made it a sublime place to stroll for as

long as I could remember—until that winter walk, which ended with

a logging truck lumbering by.

Asking around, I learned that parts of the battlefield were in

"rehabilitation." In the hope of providing visitors with an

authentic historical experience, the National Park Service (NPS)

was seeking to restore some of Gettysburg's landscapes to their

condition when the Union and Confederate armies clashed on them.

And so the trees that once crowned Devil's Den—from whose crevices

Confederate sharpshooters picked off Union soldiers—were missing,

also. Hundreds of acres of woodland, actually, were gone or going.

(In July 1863, the battlefield contained 898 acres of woodland;

since that time, the number has grown to roughly 2,000.) The

"rehabilitation," many and varied in its activities, has also

rebuilt fences, replanted orchards, and demolished large buildings,

including a car dealership. The goal, as NPS regional director Don

Barger told The Christian Science Monitor in April, is to make

visitors "almost feel the bullets. ... That is what you want to

have happen in a battlefield."

The project likely delights the reenactors who troop to Gettysburg

every year in pursuit of authenticity, as well as those tourists

who expect less to encounter history during their battlefield trip

than to experience it. Academic historians also appear to approve.

University of Virginia professor Gary Gallagher, who advised a

recent project at the battlefield, cheers in the current issue of

Civil War Times that "there has never been a better time to visit

Gettysburg." Those who might object to the removal of the trees, he

says, are "people who don't understand the difference between a

historic park and Yosemite." Rehabilitation has something for

everyone: It flatters the left's suspicion of cultural authority,

its invitation to ordinary Americans to participate in their

history, even as it honors conservatism's fetish for an unchanged,

historically correct past. Indeed, Gettysburg, the jewel of

America's battlefields, is one of several currently targeted for

rehabilitation, including Vicksburg and Antietam.

As an historian, I can appreciate the impulse to restore. But my

wife Anna felt foul about my explanation of

salvation-through-improvement, and together we ruminated on her

instinctual reaction at Seminary Ridge: Did those trees really have

to go? The more we thought about this question, the more the whole

project troubled us. Those trees weighed in our concern, to be sure.

But we began to believe we saw something larger, a distinctive

pattern of thought sweeping across the battlefield, working in

sympathy with the changing expectations Americans apply to their

history.

In the Gettysburg Address—delivered just over four months after the

battle's conclusion—President Lincoln cautioned that "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 poor power to add or detract." In this season of

Lincoln, it seems worth asking whether rehabilitating Gettysburg to

its original state is really a process of adding or detracting—and

whether the managers of our battlefields are, in their quest for

maximum authenticity, cheating visitors out of something more

important.

In high school in the late 1980s, I worked at the Gettysburg

battlefield, imparting names, dates, and locations that were, by

and large, irrelevant to the moral history of the war. Which was

fine with me. I loaded the customers onto the fleet of blue and

gray double-decker buses, climbed to the top and took my seat at

the rear, where I sunned myself avidly. The problem I grappled with

most earnestly on these pleasure grounds was how to pry visiting

adolescent girls from their fathers. As for the matter of North

versus South, I felt, perhaps along with the sunglass-sporting

tourists, that I might have gone either way.

The main destinations then were no more inspired than my tours. A

few family attractions conveyed some slight educational matter—the

Electric Map, National Civil War Wax Museum, Lincoln Train Museum,

Hall of Presidents—and, lying beyond town, there were diversions

such as the Land of Little Horses. The entertainments were neither

authentic nor inauthentic. They were kitsch, lacking any clear

point of view; and, as they were pointless, so they were also

harmless.

Today's drive to refurbish Gettysburg, more ambitious in every

respect, has not stinted on inspiration—or controversy. A

$135-million Museum and Visitor Center, which opened last spring,

has lately grabbed headlines thanks to allegations of ethical

impropriety. (Questions are swirling about why two firms—one run

by the head of the Gettysburg Foundation, the Park Service's

partner in building the new center; the other run by his son—were

selected to do work at the battlefield.) Less attention, however,

has been trained on the ongoing effort to rehabilitate parts of the

battlefield to their July 1863 states. This effort marks the latest

chapter in a contest between dueling conceptions of Gettysburg—the

battlefield as unchanging relic and the battlefield as living

memorial.

In April 1864, the Pennsylvania legislature chartered the Gettysburg

Battlefield Memorial Association (GBMA). It had taken burial gangs

until March of that year to complete the bulk of their work and

inter most of the Union dead in Soldiers' National Cemetery. And

not until 1873 were the Confederate dead removed from mass graves

and reburied in Richmond and Raleigh, Charleston and Savannah. The

GBMA made some efforts in the direction of restoration—repositioning cannons, for example—and its founder argued for

maintaining the July 1863 appearance of some key aspects of the

battlefield. At the same time, he urged the construction of

monuments, while his organization's charter called for it to

commemorate the carnage with "works of art and taste." In 1866, the

legislature empowered the gbma to plant trees at the site. By 1895,

when the Department of War assumed jurisdiction and created the

Gettysburg National Military Park, the GBMA held title to 600 acres

of land from which it had carved 17 miles of roads. In its first

decade of administration, the War Department added more than 800

acres of land, planted nearly 17,000 additional trees, and improved

roads. The commemorative work of boosters and government officials

utterly transformed the battlefield.

Administrative control over the land migrated from the War

Department to the Department of the Interior and the National Park

Service in 1933; and developments surrounding the battlefield

continued to reflect tension between the two conceptions of

Gettysburg. On the one hand, New Deal officials issued a six-year

general plan that identified a desire to return the land to its

July 1863 appearance. Barns were restored, fences and walls

rebuilt. Using workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps, the

Park Service pared away overgrowth for the sake of an authentic

view at Little Round Top. Yet, in other respects, the site

continued to migrate away from its 1863 appearance. In 1938, at the

battle's seventy-fifth anniversary, President Roosevelt came to

dedicate the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, whose torch—situated

above a granite and limestone monument—was meant to symbolize

domestic unity while Europe rearmed. Fewer than 2,000 Gettysburg

veterans attended the ceremony, and their average age was over 90.

Perhaps they exercised something of a check on the drive for

authenticity: One can see how wishing for an authentic battle

experience in the presence of these survivors—who did not have the

experience of the battle so much as they were had by it—might have

been considered tasteless.

Eventually, however, the veterans died off, and, as told in Jim

Weeks's Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine and

Harlan Unrau's Administrative History: Gettysburg National Military

Park and Gettysburg National Cemetery, Pennsylvania, the idea of

rehabilitation continued to inform new plans for the park. In the

late 1950s, President Eisenhower—whose farm was near the

battlefield—egged on the campaign to restore Gettysburg. "I think

it is a pity this one piece of terrain is not kept so that

youngsters can see it nearly like it was in 1863," the president

told Parade magazine.

Rehabilitation was a major initiative in the National Park Service's

1999 General Management Plan, thanks to John Latschar, the park's

current superintendent. Last summer, Latschar explained to The

Gettysburg Magazine how he could tell, soon after arriving in 1994,

that a comprehensive program was needed to rescue the battlefield

from the encroachments of time. "I'd been here a couple of weeks

maybe and they scheduled my tour and I went out with a retired

Marine colonel who's one of our best guides," he said. "He carried

with him a stack of historic photographs that was probably

three-quarters of an inch thick. I thought, what's he need all

these for? But what he needed them for was to explain the course of

the battle. Because so much of what the commanders could see in

1863 was obscured by vegetation that had grown up. And it was at

that moment, I can remember thinking to myself, something's got to

be done about this."

Is it possible to return vast tracts of land to their appearance in

1863? On the Park Service's website, Latschar explains that he is

drawing on maps, participant reports of the battle, diaries, and

newspaper accounts for a description of the battlefield's original

condition. If that sounds straightforward, consider how little

anyone knows for certain about the site's prewar appearance. Very

few photographs of the Gettysburg outdoors from before the battle

exist. William Frassanito's Early Photography at Gettysburg,

published in 1995, identified M.S. Converse's map as the lone

relatively detailed one available in July 1863, and the Converse

map did not portray woods, hills, ridges, and other topographical

features. General G.K. Warren and his team of military engineers

made a sweeping survey of the battlefield in 1868 and 1869, then

revised the map in 1873. But even the Warren map, the most

authoritative made after the battle, has gaps and errors. "It is my

cumulative observation," writes Frassanito, "that the finished

product of 1873 more accurately reflects the appearance of the

battlefield in 1869 than in 1863."

The scale and complexity of the carnage at Gettysburg has made it

difficult to understand much about it. The approximately 1,328

markers and monuments scattered about the grounds are a stellar

collection of public sculpture, but, individually and as a whole,

they reflect "a constructed view of a certain version of the past,

rather than a factual description of some historical truth, "

according to Thomas Desjardin's These Honored Dead: How the Story

of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory. Many of these iron, bronze,

and stone structures were placed in the 1880s, and most excluded

the Confederates. Apocrypha that still surrounds Little Round Top

and other areas originated not in the infallible testimony of

eyewitnesses but in remembrances blurred, biased, or invented.

Desjardin argues convincingly that "there is no 'what really

happened' at Gettysburg; only a mountain of varying, often

contradictory accounts that are seldom in accord, all tainted in

some way or other by memory, bias, politics, ego, or a host of

other factors."

Nobody learned the practical limits of such research faster than the

battle's first historian, John Bachelder, who received $50,000 from

Congress in 1880 to write a history of the event. In spite of the

numerous interviews Bachelder conducted with eyewitnesses and

participants soon after the battle and in subsequent years, he

never produced the history for which he was paid. Flaws found in

his maps, plus the intractable conflicts he found in the collective

memory, defeated his attempt to make the story cohere. Soldiers and

commanders alike said they found their experience incomprehensible,

their vision clouded by fields curtained in smoke. General Abner

Doubleday wrote to Bachelder in this chastened spirit five years

after the congressional appropriation: "It is difficult in the

excitement of battle to see every thing going on around us for each

has his own part to play and that absorbs his attention to the

exclusion of every thing else. People are very much mistaken when

they suppose because a man is in a battle, he knows all about it."

Much of what we think we know about Gettysburg is knowledge gained

at a remove beyond the experience of the battle. Paul Philippoteaux

and his team painted the Gettysburg Cyclorama in 1884 from ten

photographs by William Tipton, photos that depicted the battlefield

as it was in 1882, not 1863. Photographers like Mathew Brady,

Alexander Gardner, and the Tyson brothers, Charles and Isaac,

circulated the earliest images of the battlefield. At Antietam,

Gardner had supplied many urban newspaper readers with their first

glimpses of dead soldiers. At Gettysburg, he captured images before

the burials finished. How easy it is to forget, in light of his

achievement, that neither Gardner nor anyone else photographed the

battle itself.

But suppose the evidence was overwhelming. Suppose an abundance of

available pictures, eyewitness accounts both reliable and

comprehensive, and maps could guide history's eye with flawless

accuracy. The question would still remain: Why should battlefield

visitors want to "almost feel the bullets"?

Earlier generations of tourists brought more modest expectations. In

1869, the Katalysine Springs Hotel opened in Gettysburg on the

heels of news that a medicinal spring had been discovered west of

town. The hotel offered 300 guests use of a billiard room and

bowling alley, as well as a cupola that provided a panoramic view

of the battlefield. This vantage point, high above the grounds,

became very popular. In 1878, a private developer constructed an

observatory on East Cemetery Hill, which also offered a panoramic

view. The War Department raised five steel observation towers

overlooking the battlefield. In 1974, a developer erected a tower

more than 300 feet tall over the strenuous objections of

preservationists.

Latschar demolished this structure (the National Tower, as it was

called by its owner) in 2000—a key symbolic moment in his drive

for rehabilitation. The towers enforce a moral distance between the

seer and the scene. Accordingly, the early ones sprung up when

memory of the suffering at Gettysburg was still raw. But towers

also impede the ability of visitors to experience the battle; and

experience is what today's battlefield managers aim to provide.

To truly experience what it was like to be at Gettysburg, we would

need to lie with soldiers as they bled to death, groaning in pain;

rotting corpses with missing limbs; streams running red; winds

swarming with flies; air smelling of burning horseflesh. As we

cannot know the precise cartography of the battlefield, or the

movements of every soldier, or the location of every tree, so we

should not try to leap backward into authenticity, or expect to

become an eyewitness to history simply by showing up. The arrogance

laid up around this expectation is astonishing. At Gettysburg, as

elsewhere, the parties of preservation, restoration, and

rehabilitation seek to transport us forward into the past by

scrubbing off the blemishes of time. But, in offering the illusion

of authentic experience, inviting us to "almost feel the bullets,"

they promise both too much and too little: They forget that

historical suffering must be regarded from a distance if tragedy is

to make us humble—or even be understood at all.

If a battlefield is not a locus of authentic experience, then what

is it? A shrine? A classroom? The trees may teach us something yet.

As flesh decayed at Gettysburg, it fertilized the earth for new

vegetation. What the Park Service calls "non-historic trees"—that

is, trees which grew after 1863—once were seedlings. Since then,

in the changefulness of the seasons, they have formed a palimpsest,

offering the closest we may come to communing with the lost souls

of the battle. "As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of

astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun gleaming on the

trees and fields," Stephen Crane wrote in The Red Badge of Courage.

"It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her

golden processes in the midst of so much devilment."

Most of us, like my wife Anna on Seminary Ridge, intuit the

connective tissues of trees and grief. That humans plant trees on

grave sites is a spiritual fact of great and ancient significance.

Homer signals a transition from war to peace by telling how

Odysseus, returning home, found his father tending a young fruit

tree. Ovid, in The Metamorphoses, tells of Cyparissus "begging the

gods to ... let him grieve forever" after he accidentally kills a

stag: "As his lifeblood drained away with never-ending tears, his

limbs began to take a greenish cast; and the soft hair that used to

cluster on his snow-white brow became a bristling crest. The boy

was now a rigid tree with frail and spiring crown that gazes on the

heavens and the stars." The trees on Seminary Ridge were a standing

reminder of the pity and terror of tragedy. Those who run

Gettysburg would grasp this—if only they were less obsessed with

authenticity and more inclined toward history.

John Summers is the author of Every Fury on Earth and a visiting