DEFEAT FASCISM

 Today we continue to honor an event of 162 years ago, one which did much to save America from an insurrectionist invasion. On a hot July day, in a small crossroads town in Pennsylvania, some 13,000 men trudged up a one-mile ascent of open land with the intent of doing enough damage to our country to preserve the institution of slavery.

At the top of the rise, near a spot immortalized as “the copse of trees,” a bloodied American army waited, its center containing the Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac led by Major General John Gibbon and under the overall command of Major General George Gordon Meade. As mentioned in an earlier post, General Meade had commanded the army for six days, or the equivalent today of since last Saturday.

The assault involved three Confederate divisions Pickett's, Pettigrew's, (formerly Heth's division) and Trimble's (formerly Pender's division).

Up until, and including, this war, battles featured heroic charges by massed men against unreliable weaponry. Improvements to rifles and artillery would make such charges insanely horrible to imagine. Defensive warfare would become the strategy of choice until air power rained destruction far and wide and mobile tanks replaced horse-drawn warfare.

No, children, neither side had air power back then. The president was wrong.

Let us pause and imagine the carnage before us after the assault as the remnants of the insurrectionist army retreated down the hill back to their beloved general who, despite his masterful attempt at preserving slavery, would become one of, if not the, most revered, warriors for many Americans, even some so-called historians.

Because Pickett’s division consisted of mostly Virginian’s, and because Virginians contributed substantially to writing the immediate history of our Civil War, the assault, commanded by General John Longstreet, has come to us in history as “Pickett’s Charge,” a shameful moniker to the other divisions and a lesson to us that history is a complex affair which can’t be learned from watching “Gone With The Wind.”

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 HONOR

In the final assault at the Battle of Gettysburg, the extreme left of the rebel force comprised men of North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi who had been heavily engaged in the first day’s fighting. They made it to the farm and barn of a family named Brian. The image below features their house as it stands today. (For some reason, the sign features an alternative spelling of the family name.)

Abraham Brian, his wife Elizabeth, and their five children were not living in the house at the time of the battle. The family fled the Gettysburg area upon news of the Confederate invasion.

Why? Well, you see, they were members of the local African American community. Yes, as free as you or I are today. The trouble was that Robert E. Lee’s army, as it marched north into Maryland and Pennsylvania, captured free black American families and transported them south to be sold as slaves.

In most of my adult life, which I have spent in Arkansas, a statewide newspaper ran an editorial each year on Lee’s birthday (a state holiday) dedicated to the proposition that he was the embodiment of honor and decency, the most model American figure to emerge from the Civil War, save the one who removed the shackles of slavery from the families that Lee’s army captured.

Odd that the editorials never mentioned Abraham Brian or the collateral damage done to free Americans by the Confederate insurrectionist on their way to Gettysburg.