Gettysburg and Antietam
Did we learn some things while visiting two of the most significant battlefields of the Civil War? Absolutely. Was it a magical, utopian, family bonding experience? No, it was not.
I think that visiting historical sites can be challenging because it can be hard to visualize what happened there. It should feel significant, but in reality, when you’re hot and hungry and basically just standing in a field, it’s hard to capture the moment.
We spent two nights in Gettysburg where the most well-known, and among the most significant, Civil War battles took place and notably where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address later that year.
On our first afternoon in Gettysburg, we hired a local guide to do a one-hour walking tour through town. This was focused less on the battle itself and more on the people who lived there during the Civil War and in the ensuing decades.
On our second day, we spent about an hour at the excellent Gettysburg Visitor Center which had a wonderful introductory film about the causes of the Civil War and the details of the battle of Gettysburg. Then, we jumped in the car with a private guide to take us around for a few hours and show us sites from the battle.
On the one hand, we didn’t have to deal with any logistics: We didn’t have to sort out an audio tour while figuring out where we’re supposed to be driving; we didn’t have to decide which of the hundreds of monuments are more significant than the others; we didn’t have to come in with much of an understanding or orientation to Gettysburg at all.
On the other hand, though the guides were knowledgeable, I felt like they had a hard time giving a succinct and cohesive story of Gettysburg which made it hard to keep the kids (and Eli) engaged. We needed the broad strokes, anchored in the historic significance of the moment. We got long explanations about one guide’s attempt to get into a locked basement that had once been used as a makeshift hospital. We also got extensive arithmetic lessons and rigged quiz games with arbitrary answers (apparently, the three “M”s that helped the North with the war don’t include “manufacturing”).
Overall, a little bit of homework (namely watching Ken Burns’ Civil War and reading Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels) proved sufficient to have a sense of the people and places of significance, and I did find that I learned a lot in the two days we spent there.
From Gettysburg, we carried on to the Antietam Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Virginia. This was the scene of the bloodiest single day in American history, where more than 130,000 soldiers clashed in a single ferocious day of fighting. At the end of the day, 27,000 soldiers were dead or wounded. Here again, as you look out over beautiful rolling fields and woods, with the Appalachian Mountains as the backdrop, it’s hard to imagine so much death and suffering.
And yet – I will ultimately remember Antietam it for different reasons. Like at Gettysburg, it’s possible to drive around while listening to an audio tour. It’s not practical to take a twenty-four foot trailer through a Civil War battlefield, so we planned to unhitch the trailer from the car so that we could do this drive.
It was right at the moment that the trailer hitch uncoupled from the car that I realized we had parked on a bit of a hill. So, I stood there watching helplessly as the trailer hitch slid slowly off the blocks, slamming hard onto the ground. I was sure the hitch would break from the impact, but amazingly it held steady. So, crisis averted, we were able to put the trailer back up on the car and carry on.
After that scare, we skipped the audio tour and drove to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, just seventeen miles down the road and unhitched again in the safety of our KOA campsite.
Honorable mention: Most National Historic Sites now seem to have security protocol and metal detectors when entering buildings and visitor centers. At the Gettysburg Museum, the guard asked us if we happened to be carrying any knives. Well, dear readers, you surely know that Ben not only was carrying a knife, but proceeded to empty his pockets to reveal that he was in possession of five knives that particular day. We found it quite amusing though the guards seemed a little annoyed. They let us through with the promise that Eli would hold onto them for the duration of our visit.
