A Trip to Gettysburg With My High School Students

Teaching Resistance by Stealth

Thank you my readers. This has been a very busy and exhausting week dealing with teaching my doctoral studies, household tasks, taking my dog Sunny Dae to get her stitches out, and getting ready for a trip with my high school students to Gettysburg. It was my first time leading a trip like this since my time at the Joint Forces Staff College from 2013-2017 when I led the Gettysburg Staff Ride which led to my extensive very extensive Civil War research, writing and education. This led me to write my first published book., Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Religion and the Politics of Race in the Civil War Era and Beyond. It began as a short introductory chapter to my Gettysburg Staff Ride Text which is solid draft of a two or three volume book about the battle. But it has to wait to the second introductory chapter which became a book in its own right is published. My agent is shopping it to publishers and I hope that it gets picked up soon so I can start working with the publication team and copy editor to get it finalized. But I digress.

This was the first time I did something like this since 2017, so I had to generate a presentation trying to condense all of my knowledge into an hour and a half presentation before we travel and then be able to condense the battlefield visit from nearly two days into half a day. Hopefully, next year we can make it a day and a half.

I got up very early and made the trip from Norfolk to Gettysburg in 4 and 1/2 hours. My students who left a bit later and had father to travel arrived and hour after me, but the second van driver gor lost and got there an hour later than the first van. This meant that I had to further condense the number or stops on the trip. But we did it and finished up at the Soldiers Cemetery where I did more than do the Gettysburg Address. I talked about the Greek revival of the 1820s and 1830s, Edward Everett’s influence on it and the Rural Cemetery Movement which produced the Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg on Cemetery Hill and many others like it. We discussed the layout of the Soldiers Cemetery where the Union dead are buried and how it was laid out so that every soldier was buried equally without regard to rank in sections representing the 13 Union States whose soldiers fought and died at Gettysburg. We discussed Edward Everett who was the featured speaker and one of the United States most famous and popular orators, and then how Abraham Lincoln was asked for a few brief remarks, which became the Gettysburg Address.

Those short remarks are one of the influential and important in the Secular “Canon” of “American Scripture”. Lincoln tief its message to the central idea of the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence in that “all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them being Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” Lincoln began with that as the foundation of Liberty in the United States and the challenges to it by the secession of the Confederate States, not only to preserve slavery, but to expand it to new territories, Free States, Central America and Cuba. Likewise, one has to remember that Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation just 6 months before Gettysburg and the entry of the first regiments of African American troops into the war against the rebellious States that started the war, and to free their enslaved brothers and sisters. By the end of the war the U.S. Colored Troops numbered almost 200,000 soldiers, or one fifth of the U.S. Army. Lincoln’s speech also included the German and Irish immigrants who volunteered to serve in the Union Armies. Over 250,000 such recent immigrants served I the Union Armies by wars end, those men fled tyranny and oppression in their home countries. They came to America and most, the vast majority who settled in the North rallied to the colors against people who they saw as the oppressors of others, and many Irish hope to eventually use there military experience to free Ireland from the English, whose rich land owners, elites and businessmen supported the Confederates, not that many middle and working class English were anti-slavery and anti-confederate. Regardless, nearly half of the Union Army were recent immigrants or free Blacks by the end of the war.

The Unitarian pastor, abolitionist, and leading Transcendentalist thinker, Theodore Parker wrote:

“Our national ideal out-travels our experience, and all experience. We began our national career by setting all history at defiance – for that said, “A republic on a large scale cannot exist.” Our progress since that has shown that we were right in refusing to be limited by the past. The practical ideas of the nation are transcendent, not empirical. Human history could not justify the Declaration of Independence and its large statements of the new idea: the nation went beyond human history and appealed to human nature.”

The Only Picture of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address

I mention this because it is important, especially today. Now I mentioned how Lincoln’s speech referred to the past and linked it to the present, but he also made it a challenge to Americans of every generation since. His few brief remarks are here:

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 can not consecrate — we can not 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.

Dr. Allen Guelzo, Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College wrote in the New York Times:

“The genius of the address thus lay not in its language or in its brevity (virtues though these were), but in the new birth it gave to those who had become discouraged and wearied by democracy’s follies, and in the reminder that democracy’s survival rested ultimately in the hands of citizens who saw something in democracy worth dying for. We could use that reminder again today.”

Today we face a crisis on the order of that posed in the Civil War, but now it is the American President creating the crisis that threatens our existence as a free people. Now is our time to rise up to save the Union and stand for Liberty, not just democracy. Are we capable of doing so? I believe that we are, but it will be difficult.

Tomorrow I travel home stopping at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania battlefields on the way, if not both at lead one. I will get pictures from some of our students and principal to put up in another article about educating students about such topics when the Trump Regime is doing all it can to crush such teaching.

So until next time, have a great weekend and watch your six.