The battlefields themselves were similar in a lot of ways. Both involved a visitor center, with a dramatically-narrated movie (James Earl Jones for one, Morgan Freeman for the other) with lots of reenactors and some museum-type exhibits.
The main attraction at both battlefields was the self-guided driving tour through the farmland and woods where the fighting took place. The fields at Gettysburg, and Antietam to a lesser extent, were lined with memorials erected over the years by veterans groups to various regiments: the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry, the 1st Maryland Cavalry, the Massachusetts Sharpshooters, and so on. Hundreds and hundreds of stone markers, obelisks, bronze soldiers, men on horseback, crosses, slabs – over acres and acres of battlefields.
You drive along, and get out to look at some of them. The map tells you where to stop to see where this charge happened, or where this skirmish took place, or where the cannons were lined up. Military history per se has never really done it for me – battlefield strategy, maneuvering, who had what guns and what numbers – just not my thing. So honestly, I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened at either Gettysburg or Antietam. I know that Robert E. Lee tried to move North, and failed each time. The thing that hit me though, was the sheer number of people who died at each battle. Something like 8,000 men, all Americans, killed each other at Gettysburg. At Antietam, 4,000 people killed each other in a DAY. And in the whole Civil War, over 600,000 people died altogether. More than half a MILLION. I just can’t wrap my head around a number that big, period, much less when that number represents actual people. There was a quote from the period typed up in one of the visitor center museums: “Every name is a lightning stroke to some heart and it breaks like thunder over some home, and it falls a long black shadow upon some hearthstone." The other thing too is that there were so many photographs from the Civil War. So you see these mens’ faces, and their funny hats, and bad haircuts. I don’t know. Just unbelievably sad, I guess.
And you like to think we’re moving forward. We don’t line people up in fields and charge at each other with rifles and bayonets anymore. Soldiers don’t die from infection right and left, or have limbs sawed off in tents. But now, instead of slaughtering each other in cornfields, we can kill people half-way around the world with remote-control drone planes operated from some air-conditioned military base safely in the U.S. Which makes war much less terrible for us, of course. But there was another quote I remember from one of the museums, that Lee said at some point during the war: “It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it.”
A less-somber side note. Gettysburg was swarming with groups of high school students. Hordes of teenagers, punching each other, singing songs and, mysteriously, pretending to be galloping horses running around the museum. Of course, in fairness, I remember field trips being basically fun times to hang out with your friends and act ridiculous. But man, I hope I am ready for the youth of America.
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