Post-104: Gettysburg 150th — Reading, Watching, Walking

We’re now past the 150th anniversary of the dramatic Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3).

I’ve had the ambition for several years to walk from the northern suburbs of Washington, DC to Gettysburg, retracing the footsteps of the army. I attempted this in 2011, and nearly made it all the way. I didn’t have enough time.

I planned to do it in July 2013, the actual 150th, and even made tentative plans to do so with my friend Jonathan S., but alas I was in Korea at the time.  (He’s been having a hard time recently, a kind of frustration about being low on the chain in the post-2008 economy, flailing around and not getting ahead. I know more than a few people in that position.)

That reminds me. Somebody has posted the extended-version of the 1993 film “Gettysburg” onto Youtube. It’s been up for several months,, and has 150,000 views as of today. Four and a half hours, total running time.

The charge of the 20th Maine (as in the painting above) is shown from 2:28:00 to 2:33:00 (two hours, twenty-eight minutes). The 20th Maine was at Little Round Top, on the extreme left wing of the Union Army’s defense line. General Lee chose to attack the Round Top hills on July 2nd. If they’d taken the Round Tops (nobody remember, but there is also a “Big Round Top”), the Confederates could have put artillery on them, threatening the rest of the Union line, probably inducing Union retreat, and thus winning the battle. That’s the implication in Killer Angels.

Around the early 1990s, my dad read the now-classic book Killer Angels, an account of the battle. Although written like fiction, it is essentially nonfiction. There were a couple trips to Gettysburg inspired by that book (I guess). I was too young to appreciate the trips, or much remember them. I remember cassette tapes being played. More driving than walking. Maybe the trip was a stop-off on route to Iowa (where my father’s family lived/lives). That seems likely.

Later, in the mid-1990s, in one of the final years of his life, my mother’s father also read the book Killer Angels. This may be an incorrect memory, but I remember him reading it at my aunt’s house in Chester, CT. A memory I am more sure of is that he finished it in one day, from cover to cover. I was amazed at the time. How could anyone finish a book in one day! I thought. It is several hundred pages.

I finally read that book, too, in 2012. I bought it in Korea. I spent all of 2012 in Korea. The author of that book immortalized the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment and its commander, Colonel (later General) Joshua Chamberlain, who was an academic, a professor, before the war, and spoke several languages.

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Related: I wrote in post-103 about Lincoln’s humility displayed in his correspondence with General Grant, along with my amateur social analysis of American personality virtues

Related: I wrote in post-102 about the man who may well be the worst commander of the U.S. Civil War.

Related: I wrote in post-14 about a ‘relative’ who was killed at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. I consider him to be the first person bearing my surname to have lived in the USA, and will continue to think so until I see contrary evidence.