Pickett's Charge in History and Memory

Chapter One DISCONNECTED THREADS Fifty years after Pickett's Charge, survivor D. B. Easley of the 14th Virginia finally admitted he had not seen very much of his regiment's most famous assault. He had become "so engrossed with his part of a fight" that he recalled "very little else." In apologizing for the haziness of his memory, he conceded an even more telling point: in the heat of battle, a soldier "fails to note all he does see." Offering an equally important caveat, a Pennsylvania captain explained that many soldiers could not describe the chaos of combat, so they filled their letters, diaries, and official reports with exaggerations, fabrications, generalizations, or laconic dispassion. He feared that despite the efforts of conscientious historians "to weave a symmetrical whole from such disconnected threads," they really preserved only a few bits of any military action, even one so dramatic as the great charge at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.A battlefield, according to military historian S. L. A. Marshall, is indeed "the lonesomest place which men share together." Each soldier's perceptions of what he saw or did in combat-or what he thought he saw or did-became individualized sets of memories. Moreover, such personal recollections are very selective. No soldier recalls every action he takes or every observation he makes in battle, argues historian Richard Holmes, because "the process of memory tends to emphasize the peaks and troughs of experience at the expense of the great grey level plain." Those peaks and troughs provide the disconnected threads of experience the Pennsylvania captain described. Only the most exceptional events, even on this momentous day in American military history, were likely to leave lasting marks in the soldiers' memories.What did the survivors of that day tell us? Immediate postbattle musings offer glimpses of the horrific clash of arms. Collectively, however, they represent only a set of remarkable moments. These fragments of memory, as historian C. Vann Woodward has asserted, provide "the twilight zone between living memory and written history" that becomes the "breeding ground of mythology." All too often, however, this mythology wears the mantle of "history," and it is the perpetuation of this kind of record-written by the "eye who never saw the battle"-that Lieutenant Haskell dreaded.What do those fragments tell us about what happened between Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg on the afternoon of July 3, 1863? They tell us many important things, and not all of them are obvious to the best scholars. Historians often miss one particularly important point about that day: thousands of soldiers marched away from Gettysburg with no lasting memory at all of the great charge of July 3. Pvt. Samuel A. Firebaugh of the 10th Virginia recalled his own tough fight on Culp's Hill early that same morning as "the hardest contested battle of the war, lasting 6 hours" but dismissed the assault that afternoon with "Hill attacked on the right." Col. Moses B. Lakeman of the 3rd Maine, after a hard fight at the Peach Orchard on July 2, summed up the next day with a few unspectacular observations: "Went to support of Second corps; no casualties. Rained at night. Enemy completely repulsed in our front all day. Commanding brigade." The grand assault left no mark at all in the memories of the thousands of Gettysburg's survivors who played no part in the attack or its repulse.More interesting, of course, are the memories of soldiers who did participate in the event. Honest soldiers, such as Sergeant Easley, realized that they just did not see enough of the fighting on July 3 to explain very much about it. As a Pennsylvania soldier suggested, "None but the actors of the field can tell the story" of a battle, and even then, "each one can tell of his own knowledge but an infinitisimal part." This truth behind these veterans" observations compels both explanation and appreciation.First,Reardon, Carol is the author of 'Pickett's Charge in History and Memory', published 2003 under ISBN 9780807854617 and ISBN 0807854611.