War, Memory and Gettysburg
War, Memory and Gettysburg
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
GETTYSBURG, Pa.-Over 50,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or reported
missing here in July 1863, many of them dying in terrible agony on the
battlefield or carted off to improvised hospitals where arms and legs were
swiftly amputated and tossed into large heaps on the floor. Abysmal
hygiene-surgeons would nonchalantly wipe the blood from their bone saws on
their pus-stained smocks and move on to the next victim-caused infection,
blood poisoning and gangrene. To buy time, regiments such as the 1st
Minnesota were ordered into battle against superior forces and as a result
were decimated within minutes. Hundreds of African American men, women and
children, many born free in the surrounding Pennsylvania towns, were
abducted by invading Confederate forces led by Gen. Robert E. Lee and
shipped south to be sold in the slave markets in Richmond, Va. Confederate
and at times Union forces looted homes, farms and shops. For three days in
the summer of 1863, there was an orgy of destruction, death and suffering on
this ground.
An estimated 750,000 soldiers were killed by combat, accident, starvation
and disease in the Civil War, more than in all other American wars combined,
according to a 2012 study. Rifled muskets and rifled artillery vastly
increased the range and accuracy of fire over the 18th century's smoothbore
muskets and cannons, but the advance in weaponry did nothing to perturb the
generals who clung to outdated and now suicidal tactics. They sent their
soldiers marching forward in parade-ground lines into murderous volleys as
if they were on a Napoleonic battlefield. The inability of most generals to
adapt, as Allen C. Guelzo writes in "Gettysburg: The Last Invasion," "makes
the Civil War look like an exercise in raw stupidity equivalent to the
slaughters on the Western Front [of World War I]."
I am descended from one of three brothers who fought at Gettysburg. Clark S.
Edwards was a Union general. Albert M. Edwards was a colonel in the elite
Iron Brigade. Congress voted in 2018 to award him a posthumous Medal of
Honor. David A. Edwards is my great-great-grandfather. He was a sergeant in
the 5th Maine, and his war diaries, letters, brass cartridge box plate and
pocket watch are next to me as I write.
The brothers were from Bethel, Maine. David was wounded in his right arm in
1864, days after the Battle of the Wilderness in northeast Virginia. As he
walked back from the front lines looking for a field hospital, he saw what
had become a depressingly familiar sight, wounded men screaming and writhing
in agony amid the dead. He would be haunted as much by the aftermath of
Civil War battles as the fighting itself.
"Cold and rainy," David wrote in his diary on May 12, 1864. "2nd Corps
captured a rebel division of infantry, 3 major generals, took their works,
25 guns. Our division sent to support them. We made a charge on pits. I
received a wound in the right arm. Went to the rear."
Four days later, on May 16, he wrote: "Still in Fredericksburg, nothing to
eat, no care, nothing that we need."
As a boy I hiked to the top of Monument Hill in Leeds, Maine. On the summit
is a 30-foot-high granite obelisk erected by the Union general and fierce
abolitionist Oliver Otis Howard, who was from Leeds. He lost his right arm
in the Battle of Fair Oaks/Seven Pines in a June 1862 action for which he
was awarded the Medal of Honor. After the war he was the commissioner of the
Freedmen's Bureau and helped found historically black Howard University in
Washington, D.C., serving as the school's president from 1869 to 1874. He
called his obelisk a peace monument and inscribed on it: "Peace Was Sure
1865." Howard railed against the glorification of war, writing, "We cannot
well exaggerate . the horrors, the hateful ravages, and the countless
expense of war." Stories of war, he said, should serve only one purpose, to
"show plainly to our children that war, with its embodied woes and furies,
must be avoided."
By focusing on battlefield exploits we too often blot out the suffering of
the soldiers, the families that lost sons, brothers and husbands, and the
hundreds of thousands of children left without fathers. We ignore the
crippling physical and psychological wounds that plague veterans. Units in
the Civil War were raised locally. Towns and villages could within one day
of heavy fighting lose a third or more of their men, plunging entire
populations into collective grief. Maine, per capita, sent more men to war
than any other Northern state. There is hardly a town in Maine that does not
have a Civil War memorial with a shockingly long list of names. The weight
of the loss was still felt when I was a boy in the 1960s, especially, in my
case, because my grandmother lived with her grandfather, David, the onetime
sergeant, until he died when she was 8. He was wracked by pain from his
wound until the end of his life.
"Burial Parties were sent out, and those who could get away from their
commands went out to view the scene of carnage, and surely it was a scene
never to be forgotten," wrote a New Jersey soldier. "Upon the open fields,
like sheaves bound by the reaper, in crevices of the rocks, behind fences,
trees and buildings; in thickets, where they had crept for safety only to
die in agony; by stream or wall or hedge, wherever the battle had raged or
their waking steps could carry them, lay the dead. Some with faces bloated
and blackened beyond recognition, lay with glassy eyes staring up at the
blazing summer sun; others, with faces downward and clenched hands filled
with grass or earth, which told of the agony of the last moments. Here a
headless trunk, there a severed limb; in all the grotesque positions that
unbearable pain and intense suffering contorts the human form, they lay.
Upon the faces of some death had frozen a smile; some showed the trembling
shadow of fear, while upon others was indelibly set the grim stamp of
determination. All around was the wreck the battle-storm leaves in its
wake-broken caissons, dismounted guns, small arms bent and twisted by the
storm or dropped and scattered by disabled hands; dead and bloated horses,
torn and ragged equipments, and all the sorrowful wreck that the waves of
battle leave at their ebb; and over all, hugging the earth like a fog,
poisoning every breath, the pestilential stench of decaying humanity."
The miasma of rotting bodies after the Battle of Gettysburg, exacerbated by
the carcasses of 5,000 horses and mules, lingered for weeks. Residents in
the town of Gettysburg had to cover their mouths and noses when they went
outside.
"A sickening, overpowering, awful stench announced the presence of the
unburied dead upon which the July sun was mercilessly shining and at every
step the air grew heavier and fouler until it seemed to possess a palpable
horrible density that could be seen and felt and cut with a knife . ," wrote
Cornelia Hancock, a Union nurse at Gettysburg.
Time has long since erased these gruesome sights and smells from the
battlefield national park, along with the disorienting confusion, fear and
deafening noise of combat. The groomed fields and undulating hills are
dotted with stately monuments to Civil War units and leaders. The park
memorializes the aspect of the battle and the war the state wants us to
memorialize. It tells us that honor, glory and courage, true patriotism,
come from serving the state, although, as Ulysses S. Grant said, the
Confederate cause was "one of the worst for which a people ever fought."
The Gettysburg park implicitly celebrates nationalism and elevates the
warrior caste. The Confederates, fighting to preserve slavery, have, with
the deified Lee, been admitted into our pantheon of national heroes because
of their martial valor. The cruelty and folly of war, along with the
holocaust of slavery and the widespread grief and suffering caused by the
staggering numbers of dead and wounded, are treated as tangential aspects
eclipsed by the great sacrifice.
I stood on Little Round Top, a hill within the park where the breastworks
erected by the 5th Maine are still visible. David, who fought there, had
little use for senior officers, including his brother the general, who like
many other generals callously sent men to be slaughtered to burnish
battlefield credentials. In a letter to his wife dated Aug. 16, 1864, from
the hospital at Camp Fry in Illinois he calls his brother "a miserable,
lying scoundrel" who is "devoid of any moral or manly principle or honor."
"His nature is composed of selfishness and egoism," he added.
Clark Edwards, a friend of Gen. Joshua Chamberlain, like Chamberlain and the
New York politician and general Dan Sickles, would spend the postwar years
elevating himself as an icon of battlefield heroism and use that image to
further his political ambitions, which included an unsuccessful run for
governor of Maine as the Democratic nominee. (Guelzo writes of Sickles,
whose military incompetence nearly led to a Union defeat, that he "oozed
sleaze and dissimulation from every pore.")
David Edwards, along with the other soldiers on Little Round Top, was
acutely aware that Chamberlain's 20th Maine played only a secondary role in
repulsing the Confederates. The Confederates were denied Little Round Top,
an important piece of raised topography on the battlefield, because of the
foresight of Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren and the alacrity and courage of
brigade commander Gen. Strong Vincent and Col. Patrick O'Rorke, who
commanded the 140th New York Infantry. But because Vincent and O'Rorke were
killed in the defense of the hill, there was little impediment to
Chamberlain's tireless revisionist accounts of the fight. Chamberlain, in
addition to being awarded, like Sickles, the Medal of Honor, became the
president of Bowdoin College and served four terms as the governor of Maine.
He authored "seven accounts of Gettysburg," Guelzo writes, "giving himself
the starring role on Little Round Top, and Little Round Top the starring
role in the battle." Guelzo adds: "Mortality, and the ex-professor's
considerable flair for self-promotion, vaulted him ahead of others."
It was the third brother, Albert, who would be at the center of some of the
most savage fighting at Gettysburg, narrowly escaping death. He was at the
time a captain in the 24th Michigan, one of five regiments in the Iron
Brigade. He had attended the University of Michigan and been a newspaper
reporter, an experience that helped make his official battlefield reports
literate and at times moving.
The Iron Brigade was one of the most celebrated brigades in the Union Army,
easily identifiable by the black "Hardee" hats its members wore instead of
the blue caps typical of most Union troops. By the end of the war it would
lead all federal brigades in percentage of deaths in battle. But the
combat-forged hardness of its troops came with a cost.
My grandmother had the 1891 edition of "History of 24th Michigan of the Iron
Brigade," which I now possess. It has a dried rose between page 234 and 235.
I was haunted when I first read it as a boy not only by the horrific losses
endured by the 24th Michigan in the first day of the battle, which left
Albert in command, but by the execution of a deserter, Pvt. John P. Woods of
the 19th Indiana, on June 12 on the way north.
"At about 2 o'clock the Iron Brigade led the column into a field, preceded
by the prisoner sitting on his coffin," Sgt. Sullivan D. Green wrote in the
history. "In silence, three sides of a hollow square were formed. The coffin
was placed on the ground, the prisoner alighted from the ambulance with the
chaplain who held a few moments' converse with the doomed man. ."
Twelve soldiers were selected for the firing squad and issued muskets. One
of the muskets had a blank.
"A handkerchief was placed over his eyes, and his arms and legs were bound,"
Green noted. "At the command 'attention,' the usual word of caution or
preparation, they were to fire," Green wrote. "The hat [in the hand of an
officer] was lifted-10,000 eyes were strained in one breathless gaze-it was
lowered, and many eyes withdrew from the sight that was to follow. The
report of arms was heard and a lifeless body fell backward to the dust!"
Wood's wife was seriously ill. He had tried to go home to be with her.
On the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Iron Brigade, heavily
outnumbered by Confederates, attempted to hold the Union line at McPherson's
Ridge. By nightfall only 99 of the 496 members of the 24th Michigan had not
been killed, wounded or captured, a loss of 80%. Albert and two lieutenants
were the only officers remaining on the field. The entire brigade had been
mauled, reduced to 600 soldiers from the original 1,885. The survivors were
repositioned on Culp's Hill.
I stood on McPherson's Ridge, the scene of the bloodbath 156 years ago that
took the life of Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds. The shade of the towering trees
and slight rustle of the leaves gave this isolated part of the battlefield a
gentle tranquility. But by the end of July 1, 1863, the ground surrounding
me was covered with Union dead and wounded, many of whom had to be abandoned
in the slow retreat back toward town.
"Coming up in the wake of the attack he heard 'dreadful howls' in the woods
on the ridge, and when he went over to investigate he found that the source
of the racket was the wounded of both sides," Shelby Foote, writing in
"Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863," said of
Confederate Gen. William Dorsey Pender, who would be mortally wounded the
next day. "Several were foaming at the mouth, as though mad, and seemed not
even to be aware they were screaming."
My grandmother began her life in the shadow of one war-the Civil War-and her
life ended in the shadow of another-World War II. Her only son, my uncle
Maurice, had fought as an Army infantryman in the South Pacific in World War
II, in which he was wounded by a mortar blast. He returned a physical and
emotional wreck, speaking little and retreating into a haze of alcoholism. I
remember him as a distant, bewildering man, struggling with demons I did not
understand. Like his great-grandfather David, he felt betrayed by his
country, its generals and its politicians. Maurice mailed his medals back to
the Army. Seated at my grandmother's kitchen table one morning, he told me
about the time his platoon was drinking from a stream. When they turned the
corner, they saw 25 Japanese corpses in the water. It was the only time he
spoke to me about his experiences as a soldier.
His erratic behavior was mystifying to me. I asked my grandmother after he
left what was wrong with him. "The war," she said acidly.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
Chris Hedges
