Copyright © 2019 John F. Oyler
September 12, 2019
Gettysburg!
Last weekend I had an unanticipated treat – a trip to Gettysburg! My daughter Elizabeth had to deliver her daughter Rachael to music camp in Johnstown and decided to piggy-back a visit to Gettysburg onto that trip. It was easy for me to accept an invitation to tag on along behind her.
She is heavily involved in a symposium on the premiere of a play that will be presented in the Charity Randall Theater at the Stephen Foster Memorial building on the University of Pittsburgh campus at 7:30 pm on September 14, 2019. The play is based on one of the fundamental subplots in the drama of the Battle of Gettysburg, the overpowering friendship of two key antagonists in the conflict – Confederate General Lewis Armistead and Union General Winfield Scott Hancock.
I have been attempting to help her enhance her understanding of the events leading up to the battle, the battle itself, and the role these two leaders played in it. The opportunity to revisit the battlefield was too much for either of us to pass up. In addition, I wanted to see first-hand the monuments commemorating the three local companies we discussed in a recent column –Company C (149th Pennsylvania Infantry), Company H (62nd Pennsylvania Infantry), and Company K (1stPennsylvania Cavalry).
After depositing Rachael in Johnstown, we arrived in Gettysburg just in time for lunch. The closest restaurant to our intended first stop had the unlikely name, “Gettysburg Eddie’s”. The moment I saw the picture of an old-time baseball player as part of the restaurant’s logo, I immediately thought, “Eddie Plank!”
My father grew up in Quincy, about twenty-five miles from Gettysburg. He was a dedicated Philadelphia Athletics fan; their superb left-handed pitcher, Eddie Plank, a Gettysburg boy, was his favorite player.
In 1949 Harry Keck, the sports editor of the Sun-Telegraph, encountered another great pitcher, Lefty Grove, at a Dapper Dan dinner and wrote a nice article about him in his column. It included the statement, “Lefty Grove … holds the record for victories by a southpaw”.
Reading this precipitated an explosion in our living room, followed by a sarcastic letter to the editor informing Mr. Keck that he had no business writing about baseball if he didn’t know that Eddie Plank’s 324 career wins were more than the paltry 300 Grove accumulated. It is easy to see where I got my predilection to nit-picking!
The restaurant honoring Plank in his home town was good enough that we returned there for lunch the next day. My father would be thrilled to know that his boyhood hero is still revered there.
We then went to the Diorama, a privately-owned exhibit that is billed as “the largest military diorama in the United States”. It does present an excellent three-dimensional view of the large area around Gettysburg where a series of battles occurred the first three days of July,1863. The thirty-minute narration of the sequence of events in those three days does help viewers obtain a perspective of their overall scope and relationship to each other. Nonetheless I felt that it could have been more effective, probably another example of nit-picking.
From there we went to the Gettysburg National Military Park Visitor Center. Like so many other National Park Service facilities, it was quite impressive. We watched a short film narrated by Morgan Freeman that did a good job of placing the battles at Gettysburg in perspective relative to the Civil War and the survival of the Union.
We then toured the Cyclorama and enjoyed a brief presentation on the battles with it as a background. It is certainly wonderful that the Park Service has retained and rehabilitated this magnificent work of art. It covers a circular wall, one hundred feet in diameter and forty two feet high; its circumference is 377 feet. French painter Paul Phillippoteaux actually produced four identical cycloramas depicting the Battle of Gettysburg.
He came to Gettysburg in 1882 and made volumes of sketches, interviewed survivors of the battle, and hired a photographer to take panoramic pictures of the background. Eighteen months later he and his staff finished the initial version and installed it in Chicago. It was so successful that a duplicate was ordered and installed in Boston in 1884.
Twenty years later the Boston exhibit closed: the cyclorama was sold to an entrepreneur who dismantled it and moved it to Gettysburg in time for the 1913 Anniversary celebration. Eventually it was acquired by the Park Service and installed in the Visitor Center in 1962. A massive rehabilitation project in 2008 has ensured its viability for many years to come. Remnants of the Chicago version are in storage at Wake Forest University.
A third version was displayed originally in Denver; there is no record of the disposition of the fourth version. It is known that one of these two versions was cut up to make tents for Indians on a Shoshone Reservation in the early 1900s.
Although there are inaccuracies in the painting, its overall scope more than makes up for them. The details are excellent and their cumulative effect accurately depicts the enormity and intensity of the conflict. The focal point of our interest – Armistead – is shown on horseback; it is well documented that he led his brigade on foot, through the Union line at “the high-water-mark of the Confederacy”.
We can excuse Phillippoteaux for personalizing his work by including a self-portrait of himself in a Union uniform, leaning against a tree. A wounded Abraham Lincoln being carried to a shelter where a surgeon is amputating a soldier’s leg is a bit of a stretch however. Nonetheless the Cyclorama is magnificent; kudos to the Park Service for salvaging it for posterity.
We then toured the Museum and marveled at its exhibits, video presentations, and artifacts. Again, the cumulative effect of so much of our heritage is overwhelming.
With a few minutes of daylight remaining we drove to the nearby Lydia Leister House, primarily to pay homage to my cousin Jeanne Bohn. Lydia Leister was a widow whose farm was located on Cemetery Ridge. When the battle began she took her children to safety. General Meade appropriated her modest two room frame house as his headquarters.
After she retired as a school teacher, Jeanne began volunteering at Gettysburg, re-enacting the role of Lydia Leister. At one of our family reunions she donned her nineteenth century costume and performed for our behalf. The combination of her extensive knowledge of the Gettysburg events and her ability to replicate the rural drawl dialect of that era brought Lydia to life for us. Lydia certainly was not happy about the way those “Ginruls” left her house.
Our final stop was the “Friend to Friend” monument in the Cemetery Annex. It was erected in 1993 by the Masonic Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, to honor Freemasons who fought on both sides at Gettysburg. The monument is capped by a magnificent statue of Union Captain Harry Bingham administering to a severely wounded Rebel General Armistead.
According to well accepted stories, after breaking through the Union line with a small number of men from his brigade, Armistead was hit by musket fire and fell. Captain Bingham came to his aid. When the wounded Armistead asked to see General Hancock, Bingham told him that his friend had also been wounded and removed from the battlefield.
Armistead then gave Bingham his watch and requested it be given to Hancock’s wife. In the statue Bingham has the watch in his left hand. The watch is a key component in the play that Elizabeth is promoting; confirming its significance in this marvelous sculpture was relevant.
We then checked into our hotel and set out to find dinner. An excellent choice was the Farnsworth House Tavern. It is associated with the historic Farnsworth House Inn, which was occupied by Confederate sharpshooters throughout the battle and is purported to have over one hundred bullet holes in its walls. We ate outside in a lovely garden, serenaded by a strolling violinist in a Victorian dress, and topped by a piece of authentic “Shoo-fly Pie” for dessert.
The next morning we set out on a self-guided auto tour of the battlefields and were rewarded by finding all the specific sites and monuments that interested us. We located the monument to the 149th Pennsylvania Regiment, not far from McPherson’s Barn and viewed the “Railroad Cut”, where Company D fought and where Benjamin Kerr was captured. We then drove down Confederate Avenue along Seminary Ridge with its view of Cemetery Ridge where the Union forces were entrenched.
Then up over Round Top and onto Little Round Top. General Warren’s statue there was every bit as impressive as I remembered from the first time my Uncle Joe took me to see it, eight decades ago. From there we drove through Devil’s Den and the Wheatfield where we found the 62nd Infantry monument right where Company H fought so valiantly.
After taking a loop to the east to Culp’s Hill, we returned to Hancock Avenue and Cemetery Ridge, the site of Pickett’s Charge and Armistead’s downfall. We found the modest monument marking the spot where Armistead fell, and, not far from it, the monument to the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry with its fine statue of a dismounted “horse soldier” – I wonder if he was from Company K?
We visited the Pennsylvania Monument and found plaques for all three companies. The most emotion I felt all day was reading Richard Lesnett’s name, knowing he had survived this battle only to expire the following year from wounds received at Hawes Shop, Virginia.
Also nearby is the statue to Father Corby, the young chaplain of the Irish Brigade who gave general absolution to his charges on the morning of July 2. A statue of him was erected on the very boulder on which he stood, in 1910. Father Corby later became the third president of Notre Dame University; in 1911 a duplicate statue was installed on the South Bend Campus.
In the statue Father Corby is depicted as having his right arm raised to the heavens. It was automatic that some Notre Dame football fan would eventually name the statue “Fair Catch Corby”. This is grossly sacrilegious, but at the same time grossly humorous. I suspect South Bend is the one place one could get away with it.
Visiting Gettysburg this time, equipped with specific knowledge and specific interests to be investigated, was a memorable experience. It is remarkable that a subject so extensively documented still possesses so many nuances that have not been resolved.
My perception has been that the first two days of the battle were minor skirmishes and that Pickett’s Charge overshadowed everything that had preceded it. I was surprised to learn that there were more casualties on the second day than either of the other two, and that the third day had the fewest. The intensity of the battles each day was remarkable.
Driving around the battlefield also changed my perception – the length of the battle lines was six or seven miles long! Small wonder that communication and coordination were such problems. Looking across the open fields between Seminary and Cemetery Ridges, from both directions, engenders ominous feelings. Except for Little Round Top, “high ground” wasn’t nearly as relevant as I had thought.
The strategy and tactics are fun to contemplate and second guess, probably more so than in any other major encounter. More puzzling is the motivation of the combatants. William Faulkner’s famous quotation in “Intruders in the Dust”, regarding the obsession of every young Southern man with “not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863” records his explanation of one view point. I still cannot fathom why 165,000 men were so willing to destroy each other.
I am grateful to Elizabeth for dragging me along on one of the most memorable experiences I have had. Perhaps her symposium and the performance of the play will help clarify things for me.
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