Battle Of Gettsburg

A Quick Word On Gettysburg

At this point, I've toured quite a few battlefields -- the Wilderness, Petersburg, Shiloh, Fort Donelson. I have, for several reasons, been dreading a trip to Gettysburg. I should say a return to Gettysburg, because I came here in middle school on a field trip. I remember liking it a great deal, but having no deliberate sense of the Civil War in relationship to slavery, or Gettysburg in relationship to slavery. I certainly didn't know that Confederate Armies had kidnapped free blacks during the campaign. Of course, once you understand that the South seceded to preserve an economy built on enslaved black people, the act doesn't seem that shocking. I was raised in a race-conscious home, but the role of black people during the Civil War presents a problem for black historical memory. From the broadest perspective, I think there's some shame in black history, and a particular shame in slavery. I've said this before, but black history, as it was taught to my generation, was a kind of torture porn that could roughly expressed as follows: Somewhere there would be a mention of Abe Lincoln, Booker T, the Peanut dude, and a Dream. The upshot would be that a lecture on your solemn duty to never embarrass your parents in front of "these white folks." But there really wasn't much that would lead you to think blacks had actual lives under slavery, or that that they actually did things, beyond the occasional Tubman raid, during the Civil War. On a more specific level, the Civil War presents something of an ideological challenge. Old school nationalists may well identify with black men literally fighting for their freedom--but the fact that those soldiers were doing so under the American flag, and are an exceptional chapter in the American martial tradition presents a problem. Old school integrationists, can except that latter portion, but the fact that 180,000 black people took up guns presents a deep challenge to the notion that black freedom was achieved nonviolently. On the contrary freedom was most literally achieved through the reception and infliction of horrific violence, and completed through the utter rejection of that violence. Perhaps that's the point.  But from the perspective of Malcolmites and Martinites , the 54th, Harriet Tubman, and Fredrick Douglass present us with a discomfiting portrait--a generation of black people who embraced violent means for integrationist ends.

Technology lends new understanding to Battle of Gettysburg ...

Southerners seeking to place blame for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg have long vilified Lt. Gen. James Longstreet for his hesitation to attack Little Round Top.

But a new application of spatial mapping technology, similar to the common GPS systems, has been used to construct a 3-D image of the battlefield and shed light on the controversy.

Longstreet’s order to reverse direction and “countermarch” in hopes of avoiding detection by Union forces as he maneuvered into position has been criticized by some who say the delay contributed to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg.

“Historians say (Gen. Robert E.) Lee was frustrated because he had ordered Longstreet to attack Little Round Top and he wasn’t doing it. But if

you look from the ridge, you see how open the ground was and he would have been completely exposed,” said Anne Kelly Knowles, a geography professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. “It gives support to Longstreet’s fateful decision to countermarch.”

Knowles used software known as Geographic Information Systems to reconstruct the Gettysburg battlefield with shrubs, trees and topographical features — as it appeared in 1863. That landscape has been altered over the years from farming practices and development, Knowles explained.

“The idea is, you place yourself on the terrain and ask the computer what can I see from here?” she said.

The interactive 3-D map also provided insight on the fateful decision of Lee to order the attack

on Little Round Top. Knowles’ map suggests Lee wouldn’t have been able to see the Union forces gathering to the east.

“Gettysburg is such a great case of two armies colliding with very little time to set themselves up, which makes what each side can see all the more important,” she explained.

Civil War commanders were trained to study the topography of the battlegrounds, including features such as ridges and trees, and the lines of sight proved influential to their decisions.

To reconstruct the landscape, Knowles relied upon topographical data from the massive battlefield map composed by Maj. Gen. G.K. Warren. The Union commander composed a detailed map of the battlefield that includes ground elevations and has been used by scholars to reconstruct the landscape.

It took an entire summer for Knowles to translate into a computer elevation data from the map, which measures 13 square feet and is stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

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