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The 20th Maine Memorial, Gettysburg, with a picture
of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain on the left.
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To many visitors, a trip to Gettysburg can seem overwhelming. Before even reaching the battlefield, one passes dozens of souvenir shops and tour operators, along with countless reenactors dressed in blue and gray. The names Lincoln and Lee adorn numerous buildings, and the onslaught of passersby wearing fanny packs is almost too much to bear. People swarm the aging visitor center, set to be replaced by a more modern building next year, buying framed copies of the Gettysburg Address in the gift shop and watching the battle play out on an antiquated yet riveting electric map. A car is necessary to see the entire battlefield, and there are even private tour guides that will ride with you to explain what happened during those first three days of July in 1863. As the Civil War’s most famous battle, a visit to Gettysburg runs the risk of becoming just another stop in a long trail of must-see historical sites. The only way to avoid that trap is to dig a little deeper than the average tourist.
Even if the crowds happen to be thin during your visit, one thing that you cannot escape from at Gettysburg is an overload of monuments. Every few feet, there is some sort of stone structure commemorating a unit or a leader. There are monuments for each state that sent troops to the battle, a monument for almost every general, and monuments marking important events that affected the outcome. The names of military units, based on a system unfamiliar even to today’s soldiers, overwhelm you. Along with descriptions of troop movements and discussions about the artillery and the infantry, they often do more to confuse than to explain. For example, people may learn that General Jeb Stuart, the Confederate cavalry commander, missed the beginning of the battle, leaving Robert E. Lee with little idea as to where Union forces were. Most people know that cavalry means men on horses, but they may not realize that the cavalry’s primary job is to find the opposing army and report its movements, knowledge that makes Stuart’s failure appear all the more egregious.
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A view from Little Round Top, where the 20th Maine defended
the left flank of the Union line.
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Little Round Top, a small hill that is perhaps the park’s most-visited site, can make a case as the turning point of the battle that was the turning point of the war. Rocky and steep, the hill marked the far left of the Union defenses. On the second day, almost 5,000 Confederate soldiers began an assault against fewer than 3,000 Union defenders. Despite their advantageous positions, Union forces had a difficult time repulsing the Confederates, who used their superior numbers to charge up the hill again and again. At the end of the Union line, the 20th Maine, a unit of several hundred men led by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, found themselves out of ammunition and facing another attack. Chamberlain, a professor from Bowdoin College who left his job to fight, realized that if the Confederates captured the hill, the entire Union Army would be in danger. With no real options, he ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge down the hill. Upon seeing crazed Union soldiers and bayonet tips coming toward them, the Confederates dropped their rifles and surrendered.
Bayonet charges and glorious heroics make for good history, but they do little to reveal what it was like for the men who fought. Chamberlain, with little practical military experience, managed to lead his unit to a decisive victory without reinforcements or even bullets. Seeing the ground on Little Round Top lets us imagine a little better what was going through his mind on that day. Rocks laid all over the ground, the air filled with smoke from unceasing gunfire, and the sounds of the injured filled the air. Not only was Chamberlain wounded in the foot, but he also had to worry about his younger brother, who served as an officer under his command. Seeing the small area that the 20th Maine held, and looking over the edge to where the Confederates waited for their chance to attack, Chamberlain’s actions on that day become real.
Visiting every portion of the Gettysburg battlefield is an extremely daunting proposition, an endeavor that would take days, if not weeks. Grand tales such as those of Chamberlain and the 20th Maine are only a small portion of the big picture, the highlights that everyone wants to see. But other, less glorious actions, such as the decision by Union General John Buford to make a hasty defense outside of Gettysburg, thus denying the Confederates the high ground, also deserve time and thoughtful consideration. Battles seldom turn on a single event but are instead culminations of numerous decisions by varied individuals spread out over large swaths of land. Civil War communications relied on flags and horse messengers, which meant that leaders had to guess a lot and rely on others. With that in mind, one realizes that Gettysburg, the battle that saved the United States as a nation, was decided by a collection of random and hurried decisions, which makes the end result even more remarkable.
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