Now that it's officially summer, here's my advice to parents who want to continue teaching their kids during the next two months and learn something themselves: visit Civil War battlefields. I probably overdid it with my own children, visiting about 35 in all, but here are my top five:
1. Gettysburg (July 1863)
Much as I'd like to make a surprise choice, there's no avoiding Gettysburg's primacy and sadness, with over 50,000 soldiers becoming casualties over three days.
Driving and walking this Pennsylvania battlefield explains much: the big rocks of Devil's Den were indeed devilish, and the awesome difficulty of "Pickett's Charge" -- across a vast expanse, sloping slightly uphill -- makes it seem that Robert E. Lee's hope that day was for God to intervene. (That's what Michael Shaara suggested in his fine novel, "The Killer Angels"; it's well worth reading before a Gettysburg visit.)
2. Antietam (September 1862)
The 30-acre Maryland cornfield through which soldiers charged and countercharged is still a cornfield; the farm road worn down by erosion and called Sunken Road until it gained a new name at the battle, Bloody Lane, is also a good place to meditate on 23,000 casualties incurred in one day.
Another part of the battlefield is a monument to stupidity. Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside hour after hour sent men to capture a heavily defended bridge across Antietam Creek. Yet, as Shelby Foote writes in his three-volume history, "The Civil War" -- read it, it's the American "Iliad" -- "the little copper-colored stream, less than 50 feet in width, could have been waded at almost any point without wetting the armpits of the shortest man in his corps."
3. Chancellorsville (April 1863)
Driving and walking the tree-shaded route of Stonewall Jackson's flank attack illuminates the war's purest example of bold tactical brilliance. Northern forces outnumbered the Confederates 130,000 to 60,000, more than two to one, but Lee and Jackson divided their small force, with Jackson hurrying 30,000 infantrymen on a 12-mile march around Hooker's army. The Confederates came out of the Virginia underbrush screaming the Rebel yell and the rout was on, until darkness fell. Then Jackson fell, shot by his own men in the confusion. He died eight days later, the most prominent of nearly 30,000 casualties of the battle.
4. Shiloh (April 1862) Continued... |