Today, Gettysburg National Military Park and the Gettysburg Foundation officially begin our commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. This evening, the park is hosting a ceremony to begin the commemoration. Afterwards, there will be an illumination with candles in the Soldier's National Cemetery. Over the next several days, Gettysburg will host hundreds of media members, hundreds of thousands of the general public, and the eyes of the United States and those of the world, as we remember those "who here gave their lives that that nation might live."
What follows is an article which I posted on here last year for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam. It was written by Dr. Joseph L. Harsh for the
magazine in 2002. Dr. Harsh's work has had a tremendous impact on me as a young historian, and I find his words here to be particularly appropriate as we begin our commemorations of what occurred at Gettysburg 150 years ago. His words remind us all why we have gathered at Gettysburg once again.
They are all gone now.
The dewy cheeked boys, who left home before their first
shave; their older brothers, who marched away from young wives clutching
infants in their arms; and their grizzled fathers, whose gray streaked hair and
beards belied arms as stout as their hearts.
They are all gone.
The men who discovered at Bull Run that war was not a lark,
but a vulture; who crept through the Bloody Cornfield and knelt in the Bloody
Lane; who crawled through the snows on Marye’s Heights; who would not yield on
Little Round Top and who climbed the post and rail fence on the Emmittsburg
Pike amidst a hail of bullets; they who lay among the burning trees of the
Wilderness; and who endured the dank, stinking trenches of Petersburg.
They who surrendered at Appomattox, and they who did not
jeer the vanquished there.
They are all gone.
The men who lost a leg, an arm, an eye, a career, a farm, a
fortune. Also gone are their women, who gave up a husband, a son, a brother, a
father, a sweetheart.
They are all gone.
They who learned that life is passionate, precarious, and
precious. They, who generation was touched with fire.
They are all gone.
And so are their children, for whom they fought. Even their
grandchildren are few and very old.
We who are their great, and great-great, and
great-great-great grandchildren can never know them now. We can never see them,
or hear them, or touch them.
We can know them only through the ancient photographs of
faded brown and white, where they stand mute, unmoving, mysterious to our gaze.
Or, through their music, which seems romantic, naïve, and
sometimes sickly sentimental to our ears.
Or, through their relics, the torn flags, the moth-eaten
uniforms, the dented swords and the rusted buttons, resting on silken pillows,
behind glass panes in climate controlled museums, beyond our touch.
Or, through their words, in their diaries and letters and
reminiscences, which sometimes approach but never quite convey to our
understanding the true meaning of why they fought and what they experienced.
Even more than through any of these, we can come nearer to
them when we stand on the ground where they fought, where they sweated in the
summer and shivered in the winter, where their blood seeped into the soil,
where they risked their lives and many lost the risk, where they faced the
ultimate test of loyalty to an idea and a cause.
But, perhaps, we come closest of all to them, when we simply
value the legacy they left being. For, WE ARE the future for whom they fought.
Said one of them, who was not a soldier but who also
forfeited his life in the war, while standing among the freshly dug graves of
Gettysburg, the world “can never forget what they did here.”
But he was wrong. We can forget. We have too often
forgotten. We forgot when we built cookie cutter town houses on the fields of
Chantilly, and pricey, pseudo-chateaux on Longstreet’s Wilderness, and motels
and t-shirt shops on Cemetery Ridge. And, it cannot be that we were
remembering, when we contemplated building a racing track at Brandy Station.
Yes, they are all gone now.
And the least that we can do—and, sadly, the most that we
can do—to reach back through fast receding years and thank them for the pain,
the suffering, the sacrifice, to thank them for our United States, is to
preserve, to protect, and to defend the ground they hallowed.
But our obligation is much greater than to thank them. Our
most sacred duty, our ultimate loyalty, is to remember, to keep alive, and to
pass on their willingness to sacrifice, their love of country, their devotion to
freedom.
We are the future now, but ultimately we are only a link
between the past and the future. This generation may never be called upon to
make huge, soul-wrenching sacrifices of life and fortune.
But someday—and it is as inevitable as the rising of the
sun—a future generation will again be touched with fire and will be summoned to
defend our country and our freedom.
If our children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren,
when that call comes, are too soft, too lazy, too uncaring to meet the challenge,
not only will they fail, but we fail also, and so will fail every generation
which has preceded us.
Antietam, Gettysburg, and Appomattox will have been in vain.
Yes, they are all gone now.
And soon—in a blink of the cosmic eye of time—we also will
all be gone. But we are all connected.
The Civil War is not a closed book.
It is a continuing story that never ends.
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