There is a pleasure in re-reading beloved books. You traverse the same wilderness of words and find things that you maybe did not notice before, or things that perhaps you had forgotten. I feel a similar pleasure walking the battlefields of the Civil War, Gettysburg in particular. You can study the history of the battlefield, the broad sweeps of the story from the Buford holding the line on the first day, the martyr-death of Reynolds, the fighting at Little Round Top, Pickett’s Charge and many others. However, they are smaller stories, chapter within chapters of the battle that you really need a decent storyteller to carry you through. Jim Pangburn is definitively one of those storytellers. Walking with him is both to hear the same stories retold a thousand different and new ways, but also to hear new stories. There is always a new story, one you have never heard before. That is the continuing allure of the battlefield for me, and I believe for countless others as well. How do we commemorate these stories? Most often, through monuments. I have written before on the monuments of the Battle of Gettysburg, but in the course of one week I have had my perspective on these simple stone markers broadened and deepened. On the Thursday before my Saturday day-trip to Gettysburg, I got the chance to sit down and talk with Allen C. Guelzo, one of the pre-eminent Civil War historians. During our talk, I asked him about the history of monument-placing on the battlefield. What he described for me was a transition from memorials to monuments. Memorials were placed by veterans of the battle because the wanted to commemorate and memorialize what they did there, and the comrades who fell in the battle. As time went on, and the children of those veterans returned to the battlefield, it became a monument to those who fought in a distant point in the past that perhaps no living person has lived memory of. As Pangburn took us through the battlefields, he illustrated another side of the story. For many of those who fought on the Union side, the markers they placed were for individual regiments, whereas the Confederate monuments were largely placed on a state-by-state basis. Which is not to say that there are no state monuments for the Union side; being a Pennsylvanian myself, I swell with pride to know that my home-state provided the bulk of Union soldiers during the battle and that we rightfully have the largest monument on the battlefield. Additionally, there was disparity between the monuments from veterans who raised money by themselves to make and place these memorials, and those monuments that were paid for by grants from the individual states. For example, on Little Round Top, there are two monuments to the 91st Pennsylvania facing each other. One is smaller and more modest, the other large and ostentatious. The larger one was provided by money coming from the state of Pennsylvania, and you can tell from the cast-iron plaque bearing the state seal of Pennsylvania.
Much of our relationship with the Civil War is one of a battle for memory. How do we memorialize this momentous and identity-forming time in the history of our nation? The monuments on the battlefield are testament to past and even present efforts to put something of this memory into stone. The most recent monument placed was back in 2000, so this all still a very modern and ongoing process. Who do we remember? In the past century, we have done a disservice to those held in slavery and their descendants by not remembering and memorializing the suffering experienced at the hand of the chain and whip. This is all still an ongoing process. Take a walk over the battlefield again, and meditate on where we are going with this into the future.