Gettysburg Adress: Still Balderdash after 150 Years

I am mystified by all the whooping on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Most of the commentators seem to believe that Lincoln was an honest man touting the highest ideals.
The fact that warmongers like George W. Bush and Obama purport to idolize Lincoln should be a warning sign to attentive folks.

Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner offered the most concise refutation to President Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a “government by consent.” Spooner observed, “The only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this—that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

The main lesson from the Gettysburg address is – the more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation 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.”

Lincoln’s rhetoric cannot be judged apart from the actions he authorized to enforce his “ideals”:

In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” President Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: “There is a class of people [in the South] — men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”

On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman lived up to his boast — and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.

General Grant used similar tactics in Virginia, ordering his troops “make all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible.” The Scorched Earth tactics the North used made life far more difficult for both white and black survivors of the Civil War.

Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. His abuses set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.

Antiwar.com Blog

Gettysburg Adress: Still Balderdash after 150 Years

Remembering Gettysburg: Non-Americans join the fray

By Jeffrey B. Roth

Sun Jun 30, 2013 11:45am EDT

(Reuters) – It hardly sounds like a dream honeymoon: a week charging around a battleground reverberating with the clamor of 135 cannons, the reek of gunpowder smoke and the cacophony of 12,000 soldiers and 400 horses.

Yet for Polish newlyweds Madeline and Lukas Kus, the noise and violence are the main attraction. The couple, both 30-year-olds from Warsaw, are among scores of non-Americans – some from as far afield as Australia – who have come to Pennsylvania to take part in two reenactments commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in the first week of July.

The Kuses are two of six Poles here to remember the Polish Brigade, originally formed by Polish-American Walery Sulakowski in August 1861. Almost two years later, the brigade, part of the 14th Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, was deployed to Gettysburg to take part in the largest battle of the American Civil War. Casualties (killed, missing in action, wounded or captured) for Union and Confederate troops totaled 50,000.

Madeline Kus, who is portraying a Confederate drummer boy in the June 27-30 reenactment organized by the Blue Gray Alliance, has been taking part in Civil War re-creations for more than two years.

A second reenactment, sponsored by the Gettysburg Anniversary Committee, will take place at a farm near Gettysburg on July 4-7. That version is expected to include about 300 foreign-born reenactors from a range of countries including Canada, Austria, France, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark and Britain.

All the simulated encounters take place on private farmland. “Officers” assign roles in famously well-known and researched engagements within the battle of Gettysburg, like Pickett’s Charge or the battle of Devil’s Den, and participants arrive already knowledgeable and prepared to feign death.

Military historian Professor Peter Stanley of the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, will be among the group in the second event.

“I’ll be wearing the ‘undress’ uniform of a major of the 101st Royal Bengal Fusiliers,” said Stanley, author of 25 books, most of them on military history. That means a dark blue patrol jacket, lavender-blue trousers and a cap.

“I’ll be representing one of the British officers who spent time with both sides observing the war in America. Some British officers came especially; many came down from their stations in Canada. My major is stopping off on the way home from India on leave. I’ll be ‘armed’ with a walking stick, since I’m just observing,” he said.

Stanley said he got hooked on his academic specialty after reading Robert Alter’s “Heroes in Blue and Gray” at the age of 11.

For 72-year-old Frederick “Derek” Philips, of Scotland, who portrays Captain William Wilcox of the 95th New York, the occasion affords the chance to relive history. Philips, a member of the American Civil War Society in the UK, said he participates in about five such events a year in the British Isles.

Philips, a history teacher who has visited Gettysburg several times in the past, said he met members of the Confederation of Union Generals 10 years ago at the commemoration. “I was invited to join as an (aide-de-camp) to Major General John F. Reynolds. Wilcox was with General Reynolds when he was killed at Gettysburg on the first day of the battle.”

Gettysburg officials are expecting 250,000 visitors to visit the small south-central Pennsylvania borough of about 7,700 residents for the anniversary. To accommodate them, officials have hired law enforcement and emergency service personnel to provide security and related services.

As a result of the Boston Marathon bombing earlier this year, authorities have put additional security measures in place, banning large backpacks from grandstands and deploying additional police and emergency service personnel.

(Editing by Arlene Getz and Prudence Crowther)

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Reuters: Oddly Enough

Remembering Gettysburg: Non-Americans join the fray

Gettysburg: Where America Got Its Chance to Start Over

GETTYSBURG – When General Robert E. Lee formed his battle lines on Seminary Ridge, he assembled the largest Confederate army to appear on any battlefield of the Civil War.

Never before had Lee commanded so many men. And never again would he come within reach of such numbers to follow his orders as those men lined up for nearly a mile on that fateful field.

It was July 3, 1863. The United States was 13 years shy of its 100th birthday and was, perhaps, within hours of witnessing its demise as a result of its own bitter divisions.

Lee’s strategy, as he marched his army out of Chancellorsville, Va., in June, was to head north and seize Pennsylvania’s capital, Harrisburg, in order to win the war – not one battle or campaign, but the entire war – on Northern soil.

Backed by troops in high spirits, he set off for Pennsylvania to convince the North, through a decisive strike, that the Confederates could and would prevail.

He would go to his grave carrying the burden that he failed to fully explain his plan to his subordinates. That, in giving early orders on Day One of the three-day battle, he told his generals to take the high ground of Cemetery Hill “if practicable” – and, by using such an indefinite phrase, he failed to convey his intent to end the war on his terms, on that battlefield.

That was why his subordinates never behaved as if they were engaged in a high-risk strategy to win the war.

The attack started from Seminary Ridge with the men of Major Generals George Pickett and Isaac Trimble and Brigadier General J. Johnston Pettigrew slowly marching eastward. Almost immediately, Union artillery from Cemetery Hill to Little Round Top opened fire on the near-mile-long advancing line.

Despite the bloodied gaps ripped through their ranks by Union artillery shells and canister and by Union infantry rifles, the Confederates kept advancing. They attacked relentlessly – and Union soldiers fought back with equal ferocity.

So horrific was the Union artillery fire that it stripped the foliage from trees on Seminary Ridge, as if a tornado had passed through.

Lee’s men advanced toward the center of the Union line until bunching in a confused mass, nearly 30 men deep. Pickett ordered his division to link with Pettigrew’s to the northeast, but that immediately exposed his right flank to Union artillery on Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge.

At the same time, Pettigrew’s brigades fell under intense fire on their exposed left flank.

Outnumbered, cut off from reinforcement, those Confederates who were not captured or killed left a carpet of dead on the field and retreated back to Seminary Ridge.

Of the more than 13,000 men who charged with Pickett across the field, more than half lay dead between the two ridges. Thousands more limped or crawled, wounded and dejected, back to the Confederate lines.

Pickett lost nearly 3,000 of his division’s men, including all of his commanding generals, two brigadier generals and six colonels. Perhaps he also lost his appetite for the glory of war. As Pickett returned to the Confederate lines, General Lee ordered him to prepare his division against a possible Union counterattack.

“General Lee, I have no division now,” was all that the shattered Pickett could reply.

Lee already knew that, of course. He had watched Pickett’s Charge from Seminary Ridge, saw his troops’ determined advance across the open field under murderous fire, their ranks steadily falling, the smoke and confusion as they began to shrink from the battle.

In the three days of fighting in and around Gettysburg, losses for both armies exceeded more than 50,000 souls – the bloodiest fighting ever on American soil.

The war would go on for two more years. The country would heal eventually, but not until many generations had passed.

At the time, news accounts were conflicted over who won the Battle of Gettysburg.

But the small farming town in Adams County, Pennsylvania, became the turning point of what remains, 150 years later, America’s worst nightmare – and it became America’s chance to start over, to get right what our nation stands for.

Salena Zito is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial page columnist. E-mail her at szito@tribweb.com

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Gettysburg: Where America Got Its Chance to Start Over