Writing in The New York Times, Simon Barnicle takes us on a tour of the Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania and seems surprised—or maybe perplexed—that so much Confederate memorabilia is on display.
Monument to the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry (Wayne Hsieh/Flickr)Mr Barnicle is a lawyer and an officer in the US Army Reserve, and he writes, “The National Park Service’s curatorial choices are not the root cause of America’s continued tolerance of Confederate imagery. But the sanitized version of history presented at Gettysburg contributes to it by focusing almost entirely on battlefield details while neglecting essential historical context.”
The essential historical context he’s referring to is the meaning of the Civil War and why an infantry unit came from Minnesota, still a fledgling territory at the time with a population of about 175,000, to lay down their lives to defend a nation: “When slaveholders sought to tear the country apart, Americans gave their lives to stop them,” he writes.
It is an odd side effect of trying to give every side a voice in every political debate that we produce a false equivalency: patriots of the 1st Minnesota, whose 15 minutes of bravery at Gettysburg was instrumental in the turning of the war and the preserving of democracy, get the same treatment as people who committed treason against the United States. Today in Gettysburg, Mr Barnicle reports, you can even buy a snow globe with Confederate flags near a canon, as if both Union and Confederate soldiers were fighting the good fight.
Imagine, he postulates, a snow globe being sold in New York with not only the memorial to those who lost their lives on 9-11 but also the Al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the United States. Or, what if the Holocaust Museum were to sell swastika stickers and Hitler snow globes? I think everyone knows that the Germany of today would be the first to step up if the US needed help with anything, despite the past, just as nobody thinks the South Carolina of today is made up of slaveholders, despite a past that fought against the US to preserve slavery. To honor history is to place it in the proper context, whether that be slavery, genocide, or planes used as missiles.
On the second day of Gettysburg, the 262 troops of the 1st Minnesota, under the command of Colonel William Colvill, were situated on Cemetery Ridge. As the federal forces were driven back, their position on Cemetery Ridge was gradually stripped away, leaving a considerable gap. Only Colvill’s force remained on Cemetery Ridge. Suddenly, about 1,800 Confederate troops under the command of Brigadier General Cadmus Wilcox attacked right at the gap. Major General Winfield Hancock noted the strategic position of the 1st Minnesota and sent them on a suicide campaign to gain time for more reinforcements to plug the gap.
The 1st Minnesota charged straight into the onrushing Confederates and held them back for a time, but they were thrown back. In 10 minutes, the regiment suffered 215 casualties, including Colvill. The 82 percent loss to their fighting force represented the most significant loss by any surviving military unit in US history during a single day’s engagement. But the gap was plugged, and Wilcox’s Confederates were driven back, clearing the way for victory the following day and, most likely, the saving of the Union. On July 3, commanded by a captain, the 1st Minnesota participated in the counterattack against Pickett’s Charge.
The National Park Service has done a great job at Gettysburg, providing us with trivial facts about skirmishes in the battle, but one could easily know all this trivia about Gettysburg but understand very little about its meaning.
