James M. McPherson - Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (Crown Journeys)

Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution

Battle Chronicles of the Civil War

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (Pivotal Moments in American History)

Days of Destiny: Crossroads in American History

Drawn with the Sword: Reflections of the American Civil War

Fields of Fury: The American Civil War

For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War

Gettysburg: The Paintings of Mort Kunstler

Is Blood Thicker Than Water? Crises of Nationalism in the Modern World

Lamson of the Gettysburg: The Civil War Letters of Lieutenant Roswell H. Lamson, U. S. Navy

Marching Toward Freedom: Blacks in the Civil War 1861-1865

The Negro's Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union

Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction

The Abolitionist Legacy

The American Heritage New History of the Civil War

The Struggle for Equality

To the Best of My Ability: The American Presidents

We Cannot Escape History: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope of Earth

What They Foughtfor 1861-1865

Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand

To James McPherson Long
May he too befriend
Mr. Lincoln

I N HIS ADDRESS at the dedication of the cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln acknowledged that in a larger sense, we can not dedicatewe can not consecratewe can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or detract.

More than any other place in the United States, this battlefield is indeed hallowed ground. Perhaps no word in the American language has greater historical resonance than Gettysburg. For some people Lexington and Concord, or Bunker Hill, or Yorktown, or Omaha Beach would be close rivals. But more Americans visit Gettysburg each year than any of these other battlefieldsperhaps than all of them combined.

And Gettysburg resonates far beyond these shores. At least sixty thousand foreigners are among the nearly two million annual visitors to the battlefield. In 1851 the British historian Sir Edward Creasy wrote a famous book titled Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. The last of the fifteen was Waterloo, fought in 1815. After the American Civil War, Creasy published a new edition with a sixteenth decisive battleGettysburg.

During the bicentennial commemorations of the American Revolution in 1976, a delegation of historians from the Soviet Union visited the United States as a goodwill gesture, to take part in these events. A colleague of mine on the history faculty at Princeton University was one of their hosts. When they arrived, he asked them which historic sites they wanted to visit firstperhaps Independence Hall in Philadelphia, or maybe Williamsburg and Yorktown in Virginia, or Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. But their answer was none of these. They wanted to go first to Gettysburg.

Why Gettysburg? asked my astonished colleague. It had nothing to do with the American Revolution. To the contrary, replied the Russians; it had everything to do with the Revolution. In Lincoln's words, it ensured that the nation founded in 1776 would not perish from the earth. These Soviet historians may have been more familiar with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address than was my colleague. They knew that the famous opening words of that addressFour score and seven years agoreferred to the founding of the United States in 1776, and that Gettysburg was the battlefield on which thousands gave the last full measure of devotion that the nation might live. These Russians also wanted to see Gettysburg first because they compared it to their battle of Stalingrad in World War IIit was the costliest battle in America's own Great Patriotic War that turned the tide toward ultimate victory.

In 1896 the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that has stood for more than a century as a landmark in the struggle for historic preservation of hallowed ground. Not surprisingly that decision grew out of events surrounding the recent creation of Gettysburg National Military Park. The Gettysburg Electric Railway Company had built a trolley line over the southern part of the battlefield to carry tourists to Devil's Den and the Round Tops. The park wanted to buy the land and restore it to its 1863 appearance, which of course would mean removal of the trolley line. The company refused to sell. The government began proceedings to seize the land under the power of eminent domain. The case went to the Supreme Court, where the government argued that the ground whereon great conflicts have taken place, especially those where great interests or principles were at stake, becomes at once of so much public interest that its preservation is essentially a matter of public concern. Nowhere were such great principles at stake more than at Gettysburg, which embodied the national idea and the principle of the indissolubility of the Union.

The Court agreed. The justices ruled unanimously that Gettysburg was vested with such importance for the fate of the United States that the government had the right to take possession of the field of battle, in the name and for the benefit of all the citizens of the country. Such a use seems so closely connected with the welfare of the republic itself as to be within the powers granted Congress by the Constitution for the purpose of protecting and preserving the whole country.

The battle of Gettysburg was an event without equal in its connection with the welfare of the republic itself, as the Court put it. But what is Gettysburg as a place? It is a battlefield of about ten square miles (five miles from north to south and two miles from east to west, not counting East Cavalry Field) surrounding a county-seat town of about eight thousand people today, 2,400 at the time of the battle in 1863. It is located seventy-five miles north of Washington, 115 miles west of Philadelphia, and only eight miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, which forms the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. From the town of Gettysburg a dozen historic (and modern) roads radiate to every point of the compassa major reason why a great battle was fought there, for the road network enabled the armies to concentrate there quickly after the opening clashes.

Although it is the home of Gettysburg College and of a Lutheran theological seminary, the main business of Gettysburg today is tourism. Most of those nearly two million visitors to the battlefield spend money in town. Many tourist services flourish, from restaurants and motels to shops selling every kind of trinket and relic, from ghost tours and a wax museum to bookstores and picture galleries. Some of these businesses are cheek by jowl with the National Military Park, which includes more than four thousand acres on which most of the fighting took place during those first three days of July 1863.