Campaigning over the weekend in Pennsylvania apparently triggered Donald Trump. Although he wasn’t within 120 miles of Gettysburg, the once (and perhaps future) U.S. commander-in-chief waxed nostalgic about American’s most famous battlefield. Unfortunately, he did so by reinventing history and manufacturing quotations. Trump also took Robert E. Lee off the hook for ordering Pickett’s Charge, the ill-advised attack up a mile-long sloping field into Union artillery and rifle fire that doomed the Confederate army. Taking theatrical license, Trump even tried to infuse General Lee with some sort of faux Hollywood-style brogue.
Campaigning for president in his signature red “Make America Great Again” hat in Schnecksville, Trump suddenly mused: “Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways – it represented such a big portion of the success of this country.”
Continuing with his stream-of-consciousness riff, the 45th U.S. president continued: “Gettysburg, wow! I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor – did you ever notice it? – he’s no longer in favor: ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill, he said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake,’ he lost his big general. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys,’ but it was too late.”
The ensuing ridicule on social media was immediate. This scorn, typical of our nation’s current splenetic style of political discourse, wasn’t undeserved. But it obscured a fundamental point about the Battle of Gettysburg, which is that in the decades that followed, everyone from everyday citizens to America’s greatest writers and orators expressed what happened on those killing fields with penetrating fluency. The thousands of dead and maimed soldiers did not die in vain. They took part in a momentous clash that turned the tide of the Civil War, helped produce a “new birth of freedom” on these shores, and set the stage for eloquent elegies – one in particular – that in the words of historian Garry Wills “remade America.” Below is a sampling:
Justice Rufus Wheeler Peckham (writing on Jan. 27, 1896, for a unanimous Supreme Court in allowing the government to designate Gettysburg a national park):
“The battle of Gettysburg was one of the great battles of the world. … The existence of the government itself, and the perpetuity of our institutions depended upon the result. ... Can it be that the government is without power to preserve the land, and properly mark out the various sites upon which this struggle took place? Can it not erect the monuments provided for by these acts of Congress, or even take possession of the field of battle, in the name and for the benefit of all the citizens of the country, for the present and for the future? Such a use seems necessarily not only a public use, but one 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.”
Tillie Pierce (15 years old on the eve of the battle and the author of “At Gettysburg, or What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle: A True Narrative”):
“It was between nine and ten o'clock when we first noticed firing in the direction of Seminary Ridge. At first the sound was faint, then it grew louder. Soon the booming of cannon was heard, then great clouds of smoke were seen rising beyond the ridge. The sound became louder and louder, and was now incessant. The troops passing us moved faster, the men had now become excited and urged on their horses. The battle was waging. This was my first terrible experience.
“I remember hearing some of the soldiers remarking that there was no telling how soon some of them would be brought back in those ambulances, or carried on the stretchers. I hardly knew what it meant, but I learned afterward, even before the day had passed.”
Confederate Gen. James Longstreet (to Robert E. Lee): “General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know as well as anyone what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.”
Robert E. Lee: (Replying to Gen. Longstreet): “If the enemy is there, we must attack him.”
Union Gen. George Meade (speaking to Gen. John Gibbon, on July 2, 1863): “If Lee attacks tomorrow, it will be in your front. He has made attacks on both our flanks and failed, and if he concludes to try again it will be on our center.”
William Faulkner (writing in “Intruders in the Dust”): “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…”
Union artillery battalion commander Freeman McGilvery: “We had a splendid chance at them, and we made the most of it. …We could not help hitting them at every shot.”
Confederate Gen. Cadmus Wilcox: “Gen. Lee, I came to Pennsylvania with one of the finest brigades in the Army of Northern Virginia and now my people are all gone. They have all been killed.”
Confederate Gen. George Pickett: (told by Lee as the battle ended to redeploy his division at the top of the hill): “General, I have no division now!”
Pickett blamed Lee for the disastrous failure of the futile attack that became known as Pickett’s Charge: “That man had my division slaughtered at Gettysburg,” he said,
Eventually, however, Pickett settled on this line: “I’ve always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.”
Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain (two days after the battle): “We returned to Little Round Top, where we buried our dead in the place where we had laid them during the fight, marking each grave by a headboard made of ammunition boxes, with soldier’s name cut upon it. We also buried 50 of the enemy’s dead. We then looked after our wounded, whom I had taken the responsibility of putting into the houses of citizens in the vicinity … and on the morning of the fifth took our march on the Emmitsburg Road.”
Gen. Meade (in a July 5, 1863, letter to his wife): “It was a grand battle, and is in my judgment a most decided victory, though I did not annihilate or bag the Confederate Army. This morning they retired in great haste into the mountains, leaving their dead unburied and their wounded on the field. … The men behaved splendidly; I really think they are becoming soldiers.”
Civil War Historian Bruce Catton: “At Gettysburg for the first time, the Army of the Potomac had not been crippled by the mistakes of its commanding general. It had been given a chance, and the chance had been enough. At that crisis of the war, everything had come down to the naked fury of the fighting men, and the fighting men had stood up under it – along Willoughby Run and Seminary Ridge, amid the rocks and bushes by Little Round Top, on the slopes back of the peach orchard and the wheat field, in the smoky twilight around Culp’s Hill and the cemetery, an in the dust of the terrible pounding near the clump of little trees. They had won a victory. It might be less of a victory than Mr. Lincoln had hoped for, but it was nevertheless a victory – and because of it, it was no longer possible for the Confederacy to win the war.”
President Abraham Lincoln (Nov. 19, 1863): “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
President Franklin Roosevelt (May 30, 1934): “On these hills of Gettysburg, two brave armies of Americans once met in combat. Not far from here, in a valley likewise consecrated to American valor, a ragged Continental Army survived a bitter winter to keep alive the expiring hope of a new nation. … Surely, all this is holy ground.”
President Dwight Eisenhower (during a May 12, 1957 tour of the battlefield with British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery): “Why [Lee] wanted to charge across that field, I’ll never know.”
Vice President Lyndon Johnson (at Gettysburg on Memorial Day 1963): “On this hallowed ground, heroic deeds were performed and eloquent words were spoken a century ago. We, the living, have not forgotten – and the world will never forget – the deeds or the words of Gettysburg. … Our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.
“To ask for patience from the Negro is to ask him to give more of what he has already given enough. But to fail to ask of him – and of all Americans – perseverance within the processes of a free and responsible society would be to fail to ask what the national interest requires of all its citizens.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (invoking echoes of the Gettysburg Address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the outset of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech): “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”
President Barack Obama: (Nov. 19, 2013, in a handwritten essay for the Lincoln Presidential Library): “In the evening, when Michelle and the girls have gone to bed, I sometimes walk down the hall to a room Abraham Lincoln used as his office. It contains an original copy of the Gettysburg address, written in Lincoln’s own hand.
“I linger on these few words that have helped define our American experiment: ‘A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’
"Through the lines of weariness etched in his face, we know Lincoln grasped, perhaps more than anyone, the burdens required to give these words meaning. He knew that even a self-evident truth was not self-executing; that blood drawn by the lash was an affront to our ideals; that blood drawn by the sword was in painful service to those same ideals.”
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
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