Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg Read Online Free Page B

divisions averaged 70 percent larger than Union divisions). As Ewell's attack developed, Lee finally told Hill to go in with everything he had.
    We next head north on park roads, Reynolds Avenue and Buford Avenue, across open fields where the Union First Corps still held firm as the long, bloody afternoon of July 1 wore on. Our objective is the Eternal Light Peace Memorial crowning Oak Hill where McPherson Ridge and Seminary Ridge come together. This striking monument was dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to “Peace Eternal in a Nation United” on the seventy-fifth anniversary ofthe battle, in July 1938. Attended by more than 1,800 actual Civil War veterans (most in their nineties), this four-day event was the last reunion of Blue and Gray. It culminated a half-century in which reconciliation between old foes was the dominant theme in Civil War memory and in the numerous joint reunions of Union and Confederate veterans.
    This uniting of North and South in a renewed American nationalism was a fine thing, to be sure, but all too often it was characterized by forgetting what the war had been about. Absent from these reunions were black Union veterans who, with their white brothers in arms, had fought a war not only to preserve the nation as the
United
States but also to give that nation a new birth of freedom. And the very spot on which the Eternal Light memorial stands is the location where Major General Robert Rodes's division— the largest in either army, with five brigades—deployed on the early afternoon of July 1 to launch an attack intended to destroy that “Nation United.”
    From the memorial we head southeast on Double-day Avenue across the Mummasburg Road and past an observation tower, to stop at a stone wall alongside Doubleday Avenue. Here fought part of one Union brigade and all of another commanded by Brigadier General Henry Baxter of New York. Lying behind the stone wall, they rose to pour a devastating fire intoan Alabama brigade, stopping it cold before its attack had gone more than thirty yards. Then Baxter's men jumped to the other side of the wall and almost wiped out a North Carolina brigade commanded by General Alfred Iverson, killing and wounding more than 450 and capturing three hundred. More than a hundred of Iverson's men were buried in a couple of mass graves in a farm field, called Iverson's Pits ever since, where they lay until disinterred in 1873 by Confederate memorial associations and taken to North Carolina for reinterment in local Confederate cemeteries. Gettysburg residents insist that the associations did not find all of the remains, whose spirits rise from Iverson's Pits every July 1 to haunt the battlefield.
    One of the Union regiments that fought here was the Eleventh Pennsylvania. Their monument has a small bronze dog at its base on the side away from the road. Like several other Civil War regiments, the Eleventh had a canine mascot, named Sallie. When the Eleventh was finally driven back along with the rest of the Union forces in late afternoon, Sallie stayed behind with the dead of the regiment. She guarded them faithfully through the next four days until the survivors returned to bury them on July 5. Sallie continued with the regiment until she herself was killed in action at the battle of the Wilderness ten months later. For her faithfulness, veterans of the Eleventh honored Sallie when they erected their monument in 1890.
    We'll backtrack two hundred yards and climb the observation tower built in the 1890s by the War Department when it administered the battlefield. (The National Park Service, created in 1916, took over Civil War battlefields in 1933.) From here we get a panoramic view of the first day's battlefield— especially if we are here between November and April when the leaves are off the trees. Looking south we can also see the town of Gettysburg, with Cemetery Hill rising to its south and Culp's Hill to the southeast. On a clear day in winter we can also