Updated October 31, 2024 at 08:35 AM ET
This tense election season is also peak season at a popular landmark of the American past: the Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania.
Nearly one million people visit the Civil War battlefield each year, and the foundation that operates it says many arrive in the autumn. They enjoy the fall colors at the 6,000-acre park while also studying monuments to soldiers and their military units that fought for three days in July 1863.
I first visited with my grandparents when I was in elementary school. Decades later, I returned with an NPR team; we were interviewing voters in the area, and the battlefield was a good place to gain perspective.
We stood in the Cyclorama, an enormous 19th-century painting depicting the climactic moment of the battle. It’s arranged in a circle, and you stand in the middle, watching painted figures running, shooting, falling, and dying on all sides. “You feel like you’re in it,” said our producer, Julie Depenbrock.
The painting’s dimensions are incredible—377 feet long, 42 feet high, and it weighs 12.5 tons—but no more incredible than the battle it depicts. Eighty-five thousand Americans battled each other for three days, and around 7,000 died, a number that has gradually grown over time, as has historians’ understanding of the battle and the war.
“You can study this conflict 20,000 lifetimes, and you're still not going to find all the stories, all the answers,” said Britt Isenberg. He works for the Gettysburg Foundation, which administers the site with the National Park Service, and is also a licensed guide.
Together we stood on Little Round Top, a rocky outcrop that was supposed to be a vital part of the Union battle line. But on the battle’s second day in 1863, a single Union officer, Gouverneur K. Warren, stood atop the hill and saw it was undefended.
“I really like to dig into this moment,” Isenberg said, “especially when I have young people up here. You know, you've got five seconds. You are General Warren. The fate of the nation is in your hands. What are you going to do?
“And in those moments, are you thinking about yourself or are you thinking about the betterment of the community?”
Warren called for reinforcements, who raced up one side of the hill, just as Confederates pushed up the other. Union troops reached the top first and saved the battle, though for many, it was the last day of their lives.
“This history has come down to a lot of folks as some sort of glorious act. …it is anything but glorious. You know, you try to imagine yourself as a human in any of these moments. It's terrifying.”
I asked if it was a cautionary tale, not to let civil conflict go too far. “This is that glaring example,” he said, “of what happens when we as a people, as a democracy, let self-interests override the collective well-being.”
Isenberg has been giving tours here for a decade and says he is still learning about the battle from the many people who study it.
We found one of them elsewhere in Gettysburg: Jean Howard Green, leader of the Lincoln Cemetery Project Association.
The existence of the Lincoln Cemetery was news to me. It is not the national military cemetery — at the dedication of which President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address in 1863 — but rather an African American cemetery a short distance away.
The people buried there include Basil Biggs, a local man who lived at the time of the Civil War. Because he had access to wagons and horses, he was hired after the battle for the gruesome job of collecting the dead.
The cemetery also holds the graves of 30 United States Colored Troops, Black men who volunteered to fight for the Union. Some of them free men of the North and some of them men from the South who were newly freed from slavery.
A marker notes that few, if any, of the Black men buried there enjoyed voting or other civic rights: Without benefit of citizenship, they fought for freedom.
“Let your mind settle in on that,” Green said.
As we visited, a man called out from outside the nearby cemetery fence and chatted with Green.
“I march with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts,” he said—giving the name of the most famous Black regiment in the Civil War.
The man, Reginald Thomas, was a Civil War reenactor, one of many who march in an annual parade just before each year’s commemoration of the Gettysburg Address.
“The Union and the Confederacy all get together,” he said. “There’s no animosity, nothing like that.” Traditionally, Confederate reenactors have outnumbered Union ones, even though the Union army at the time outnumbered the rebels.
I asked if the experience ever made him think of our modern-day divisions.
“It's not because we choose to be divided,” he said. “It's just the way the country is being run. I mean, everybody has their views about different things. I just smile, grin and bear it, you know? You just keep on going.”
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