This photo of the Gettysburg battlefield at AndrewOlmsted.com reminds me that the first time I got near the place was in the early 1950s when I was seven or eight. I was in the backseat of the family car driving south from somewhere, and my father was trying to detour to it over my mother’s objections. His grandfather fought there in the Mississippi Brigade and he’d never seen it. He may have seen it later, but not that day. I didn’t get there until the battle’s 125th anniversary in 1988, the year he died of cancer. I was struck by how old the Union monuments were and how new and few were the Confederate ones. The South, of course, was too poor after the war to build monuments to lost battles. So Mississippi’s larger-than-life statue of a private "clubbing his musket" over the body of his unit’s color bearer didn’t appear until 1973. I don’t recall who built it, but I notice on the base of the Lew Armistead marker above–commemorating the Virginia general’s effort in Pickett’s Charge– that it was made in New Hampshire. This morning I saw a timely essay on the five extant copies in Lincoln’s hand of his Gettysburg Address, whose 250-word definition of democracy still rings in my head. My generation may have been the last one required to memorize it in school. "Four score and seven years ago…"
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 