The conversations at my family dinner table usually center around daily activities: what the kids did at school, which beach are we going to this weekend, whose pool can we finagle an invitation to – normal things. Recently, while my kids and I visited with my older brother, we showed them some pictures of the two of us growing up in the 1980s. They were particularly interested in the pictures seen at left (and below), of my brother and me at the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Questions flew, such as: “Wow, dad, is that a real cannon?” “Does it still work?” and “Can we go there someday so I can sit on the cannon?”
We grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and often visited the battlefield at Gettysburg throughout our early lives (until moving away after ten years). My children (aged 4 and 7 – too young to have been taught this in school yet) were blown away by some of the facts that my brother and I told them, including that family members fought against each other on the battlefield. After assuring them that neither my brother nor I would ever fight against each other (as we eyed one another across the table, sizing each other up for the post-dinner ping-pong battle that could potentially come to blows), we reminisced about the fact that we didn’t fully appreciate the battlefield and all it represented at such a young age.
History books in school and some personal copies of Stephen Sears’ Gettysburg had taught us that “Gettysburg proved to be both the largest battle fought during the war and the costliest. The two armies between them lost more than 57,000 men….”[1]
The fact that one military battle cost this many American lives is still jaw-dropping to this day. While today’s political and cultural climate could possibly hint at deeper unrest among Americans, our dinner table conversation that night centered around the immense hope that nothing like the Civil War would ever happen again. Amazingly, Tom Porter of Business Insider wrote on 1 July 2019 that “so many Civil War soldiers were killed at Gettysburg that they were still finding remains to bury in 1996.”[2]
If I could give advice to anyone reading this, it would be to visit the Gettysburg battlefield, where the National Park Service keeps the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center. Sit on one of the stone walls that still stand today, think about the huge number of Americans who fought on that vast field, think of the military strategy employed, and remember the terrible loss of life. My older bother and I recently walked down memory lane with my own children, and we hope that future generations will always remember that costly battle and the toll it took on so many families.
Notes
[1] Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), xiv.
[2] Business Insider online at https://www.businessinsider.com/gettysburg-death-toll-so-high-bodies-still-found-1996-2019-6.
Amen! You may not even realize how urgent you message is.
A wonderful picture of family sharing history
Wonderful picture of family and history. Do you know about the Partnership of Historic Bostons. http://www.historicbostons.org
Gettysburg is one of those nexus points in my family tree. My father was adopted and both his adopted great grandfather Chalkley Sears (150th Pennsylvania) and his natural great grandfather Erastus Crippen (149th Pennsylvania) were wounded at the McPherson Farm on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Although they never knew each other they were only a hundred or so yards apart that day. There were a number of other relatives on both the natural and adopted paternal lines such as nephew to the adopted line Alonzo Ulmer who was wounded at Devil’s Den and the maternal side including Jacob Weller a brother to the line who lost his arm to artillery shrapnel on Seminary Ridge the second day.
Thank you. I am sending this to my grandchildren, who may know, but may
not understand.
And when you visit the museum you will see a huge display of a soldier and his wife who is wearing an American Flag apron which she wore every day until he returned from the war. these are my Himes ancestors. What a history lesson to visit Gettysburg and then to watch the ken Burns special on public TV.
Nice article but were 57,000 men really lost in the battle? Casualties includes wounded, the estimate on the link below is about 7,000 dead. I doubt anyone knows or have a number of how many of the wounded died in the days and months after the battle.
https://www.historynet.com/battle-of-gettysburg#:~:text=Casualties%20at%20Gettysburg%20totaled%2023%2C049,a%20third%20of%20Lee's%20army.
I still need to visit Gettysburg. My great-great grandfather Josiah S. Challender fought there with the 11th Regiment of New Jersey Volunteers.
My maternal grandparents took me to Gettysburg when I was about 10, when I was old enough to understand a little about it, but not fully. What sticks in my mind are (1) the musm that had the Disney-like animatronic presentation of the battle, and (2) the overwhelming number of monuments on the battlefield.
Since then, I have found that a great-great-grandfather Isaiah Winslow Spiller (paternal side) was an artificer (blacksmith) with the Maine Light Artillery, and was at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, among other battles. I made it to Chancellorsville a few years ago, but found that his unit arrived only on the last day and remained on the fringes (outside the current park). I want to get back to Gettysburg and see where Isaiah was and what role he had in that battle.
Isaiah was an actual horse thief. He recounted to Mrs. R.P. Peabody, for her History of Shelburne NH, an incident where his captain chatted up and distracted a young Virginia woman, while Isaiah lured her horse around the corner of her barn and rode off with it.