ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704110003
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN LITTELL SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
SET IN THE SUMMER-GREEN pastures of south-central Pennsylvania, Gettysburg is a landscape peopled with ghosts, and a visit to this historic field of battle is a somber, moving experience.
Here is both a haunted and haunting evocation of the saddest chapter in our national story. For at Gettysburg, on July 1, 2 and 3, 1863, armies of the North and South clashed in the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War.
By the end of the fray some 51,000 men from both sides had been killed or wounded. But Union troops massed on the heights just south of the little market town of Gettysburg had managed to hold fast, hurling back repeated Confederate attempts to dislodge them, including the suicidal frontal assault that would become known as Pickett's Charge.
Gettysburg was the war's turning point. From here the Confederacy's road led southward in exhaustion and ultimately to Appomattox and defeat.
As park rangers at the Gettysburg National Military Park brace for the
seasonal onset of more than 1.7 million visitors, an important part of Civil War heritage is disintegrating, The Associated Press reported last month..
Park officials say current funds are not enough to stop the deterioration of many of the 400 cannons and 1,300 monuments and statues scattered about the 5,900-acre battlefield park, the largest and most-visited of the nation's 24 Civil War parks.
Even the most casual park visitor can trace the course of the battle as if from an open book.
The main part of the battlefield lies a mile below the town. The Union commander on those three days in 1863 was a canny old soldier named George G. Meade. He held Cemetery Ridge, the higher of two parallel crests - a strong defensive position stretching three miles in the shape of a fishhook from Culp's Hill in the north to a conical peak, Little Round Top, in the south.
Across an intervening mile of plowland one of the great heroes of the Confederacy, Gen. Robert E. Lee, occupied a wooded rise called Seminary Ridge. An aristocratic Virginian, he was a daring soldier known for leadership and grasp of strategy.
In the summer of 1863, flushed with triumph at Chancellorsville, Lee was at the peak of his power. His army of Northern Virginia numbered 75,000 war-tested veterans. Just days before Gettysburg he had marched his troops into Pennsylvania for strikes at the Union's heartland.
Success in the North, he reasoned, might wring from President Lincoln a negotiated settlement that recognized an independent South. As Lee moved northward, Meade shadowed him from the east.
Neither commander had intended to bring the other to battle at Gettysburg. On July 1 outriders of the two armies skirmished west of the town. Both sides rushed up their main forces, and the fight was on.
Visitors can drive around the battlefield in two hours or hike over it comfortably in a day; the distance is 15 miles. Admission is free.
Check in first at the National Park Service Visitor Center, off Steinwehr Avenue (Business Route 15). Brochures and maps are available without charge, but it's a good idea to attend the orientation lecture given on the contour model of the battlefield in the center's auditorium (adults $2; under 16 free).
In the adjacent cyclorama building an audiovisual display features a 356-foot painting of Pickett's Charge, running around a two-story rotunda (adults $2; under 16 free). Entry is free to ground-floor historical exhibits.
On a recent walking tour of the park I strolled a few hundred yards from the cyclorama building and past an equestrian statue of Meade to the copse of chestnut oaks that marked the focus of Pickett's Charge. The layout of the park is such that I found it easiest to begin here with the climactic action of the third and final day of fighting, and then work backward to the second and first days.
As I stood on this low ridge looking westward across the meadows, it took little imagination to visualize the long lines of Confederate gray emerging from the wooded shelter of Seminary Ridge. In all there were 12,000 men in the assault. Leading them was a dandified, gauntleted Virginian mounted on a black charger, Gen. George B. Pickett.
Flags flying, bayonets glittering, the Confederate regiments strode forward as if on parade. Halfway to the Union line the pace turned into a running charge. At point-blank range Meade's men in blue unleashed a withering barrage of musketry and cannon fire, tearing wide gaps in the Confederate formations.
The carnage was staggering. Some 8,000 men lay dead or wounded in the hollows between the two ridges - two-thirds of the attacking force. Dazed survivors stumbled back through the heat and smoke to Seminary Ridge, where Lee, who had ordered the thrust at Meade's center after faltering on the flanks, stood viewing the disaster.
The Battle of Gettysburg was over. Lee had failed in his last great effort to win a victory in the North. The next day he fell back to Virginia at the head of a 17-mile train of wagons bearing his wounded.
Near the farthest point of the Confederate advance I stepped out onto the field of Pickett's Charge. I dropped into a hollow along a path that looped back to the park road after about half a mile. Walking here, I became apprehensive, and for no good reason. It was much as though, on this tranquil day, I had abandoned the safety of this high ground to wander unprotected among specters of the past.
From the field, route markers point the way past some of the monuments and bronze tablets scattered like tombstones across the park. My route followed the weaving surge of battle over Little Round Top and past the boulders of a Confederate redoubt called Devil's Den.
At Seminary Ridge I turned north through a wood. Midway along the crest a glade on the right revealed a stone cenotaph, Virginia's imposing memorial to its Gettysburg dead. Atop the monument an equestrian statue of Lee gazes stoically across the field of Pickett's Charge at his old antagonist Meade on the opposite crest.
A complete circuit of the park takes in McPherson's Ridge, where the fighting started, and Culp's Hill, where Union troops repelled a Confederate flanking drive on the second day. I ended my tour at the Soldiers' National Cemetery, abutting the town graveyard on Cemetery Hill directly across the Taneytown Road from the Park Service Visitor Center.
Here, shaded by stands of eastern hemlock and sweet buckeye, the graves of 3,512 Union soldiers fan out in a broad semicircle. But the focus of the site is a granite column surmounted by a marble statue, a symbol of Liberty.
It rests on the knoll where Lincoln, asked to deliver "a few appropriate remarks" at the cemetery's dedication, read the brief but now famous address defining the purpose -preservation of the Union - for which the war was fought. Lincoln spoke on Nov. 19, 1863.
An aura of history, an awareness of being in the presence of great and tragic events, is still pervasive at Gettysburg.
LENGTH: Long : 129 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: HARRY LITTELL. 1. A statue of Gen. Gouverneur Warren,by CNBchief engineer of the Army of the Potomac, stands on the rock from
which the general watched the Confederate troops advance. 2. The
Virginia State Memorial (above) was the first of the Southern state
monuments to be erected at Gettysburg. The monument, which is topped
by Gen. Robert E. Lee astride his beloved Traveler, is placed at the
site from which Lee observed the battle. 3. A cannon (left), one of
400 in the park, sits on part of Gettysburg's 5,900 acres. 4. One of
the 1,300 statues and monuments scattered throughout the park.
color.