Reflections on Gettysburg

The girls and I spent the first semester of the school year studying the Civil War. Three times we scheduled a trip to Gettysburg and three times we had to cancel. It is one thing to read about an event in history, but quite another to actually see the place it happened. Finally, we arrived in Gettysburg on a gorgeous, sunny spring day.

Fred's desire for the trip was to buy a CD for the auto tour and drive around the park listening to the chronology of the three day battle. I was hoping to see the newly remodeled visitor's center and see what all the talk was about the Cyclorama--a 360 degree painting of Pickett's charge that will immerse you in the scene. The girls wanted to swim in the hotel pool and not have me make this trip into a school lesson (although, of course, it was). For each of us, Gettysburg did not disappoint!

Arriving in the town, you feel as if it was 1863 again. Of course, there is an outlet mall on the highway going in and fast food restaurants line up on either side of the main road on the outskirts. But the town has been preserved in many ways to reflect the time of the war. Our tour book tells us even the farmland surrounding the town is very much the same as it was over a hundred years ago. It is an idyllic setting, tranquil and lovely. Delicate, tender green shoots of early spring intermingled with the purple soft flowers of redbud trees. The rolling, peaceful countryside is a sharp contrast to the savage and bloody three days on these fields long ago. It is hard to imagine the booming of cannons and the smoke of the rifles when all we heard this day was the singing of birds. Even when other people were around, most spoke in hushed tones. The place commands a solemn reverence.

Part of this quote written by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in 1889 hangs on a wall as you exit the Civil War Museum. Many pause to read it: "In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream, and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls."

Abraham Lincoln says in his Gettysburg Address, "...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom..." Did these men die in vain? What was it all about anyway? Visiting Gettysburg causes you ponder.

At the Eternal Light Peace Memorial is another quote by Lincoln. It says, "With firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right." Honorable men act on what they believe is right. There were honorable men on both sides of this great war.