Wednesday - Shriver House and Body Parts

Just down the street from David Wills’ in Gettysburg is the home of George and Hettie Shriver, an ill-starred couple; it is a monument to the permanent destruction of the war on families.  He’s a well established young man who inherits a farm and several thousand gallons of liquor.  The war intervenes and he’s never able to open the saloon and bowling alley he organizes.  He enlists early in the army, dies late in Andersonville.  They have two young daughters who escape Gettysburg with her as the battle begins to the safety of her parents’ farm. . .between Big Round Top and Little Round Top!  That home becomes a hospital, as does Hettie’s back in town, she discovers when returning a few days later.  At both places, as we hear at other stops, body parts were stacked as high as the fence.  (Our docs on board are fascinated by the medical practices of the day.  One buys books on the subject, another buys miniatures of the medical workers.)

Hettie discovers her house had been taken over by Confederates who knocked a hole in the attic wall for sharpshooters to whack Union soldiers.  They’ve used her furniture as barricades, her garden for dining.

The costumed docent tells us what was hubba-hubba in the day – her stockinged ankle. . .gasp!  As she describes Hettie’s domestic life, it seems more imagined than real, but I only had a vague “I read it differently somewhere” sense.  How to learn more?

We notice there are no closets in the rooms.  Closets were taxed, so clothes stayed in chests and chiffarobes.

As we go through this and other homes, I’m just sure that in a past life I was a wealthy Southerner.  How do I know?  When I look at all the lazy bits of me, the things I just WON’T do until I have to, these were the tasks of slaves.  And I would’ve been pretty firm about not joining in to do my part.  Happy to be waited on, thank you.  Still in my DNA, apparently.  Or, maybe I’m just bone lazy.

Thursday: Acting Our Age

The smiles are still firmly in place, but we’re beginning to act our ages.  Coughs from congested chests rumble through the bus.  Privately, a couple of us have bad back pain, we stop for drugs, we snooze between, sometimes during, lectures on the bus.  We have been on long-for-me marches, and my knees and back complain of frequent leaps from and into the bus.

We are still a jolly group.  Colonel Historian, after his daily puns, turns over the microphone to those who want it.  Colonel Jerry reads a moving piece about military spouses, Mark tells funny cop stories about stolen parrots and 80-year-old drivers, Carol about securing a meeting with Indira Gandhi the week before her assassination.  We hear jokes about the Keilor-inspired Lutheran Airlines (the first 10 rows bring casseroles, the next, salads), kindergartners reporting on summer vacations, coaching stories.

All the groans were not from pain. 

We arrive at Glen Allen, Virginia, where our trip will end Sunday morning.  When we arrive at our hotel after a rainy drive, we learn we've been driving through a tornado warning!

Are You Following?

It's Sunday evening and we head home tomorrow.  I'm just getting the chance to write up some of the days.  So, I'm skipping back and forth.  Sorry.  These have been exhausting battles.

Wednesday: Pickett’s Charge

I run a risky game trying to report Civil War facts that whiz by too quickly to grab and hold.  Is that general north or south?  Did 500 or 5,000 die there?  Oh, Jeb Stuart was CAVALRY!  Did the North or the South win that battle?  Okay, so Lee’s strategy was often defensive, and he would succeed by attacking the Northern flanks.    He would go at the flanks, then charge the middle, right?  Especially with Civil War enthusiasts, whose throbbing brains have every factoid DOWN, including those about the private from the 20^th Maine.  They remember and regurgitate, and I’d better get it right. . .but I’m not so sure I will.

As the weather girl, I’m not making my bus-mates happy.  It’s raining as we drive from one Gettysburg monument to the next, but the weather holds  for the deeply quiet, muddy tromp across the field of Pickett’s Charge on July 3.  Pickett’s boss, Longstreet, didn’t want to do it (and barely waved his order to commence), but Lee thought he could break the Union center, having gone at their flanks the day before.  Over half the 14,000 Confederates died who charged following an artillery barrage, and the loss broke the psychological back of the South (Vicksburg also fell that day).  Lee left Pennsylvania after Gettysburg; he hadn’t anticipated the Union numbers resisting him.

We begin where the charge did in the woods among the Confederate soldiers,  now brooded over by the imposing monuments raised by the units that fought here.  The more intrepid among us start across the field.  I collect acorns because it somehow makes me feel hopeful about what can grow from them; it seemed a fitting salute to those soldiers.  We unintrepid get on the bus and wheel over to the Union side, where we watch our bus-mates approach.  They are exposed on a ¾-mile stretch; they have to leap over two rows of split-rail fences, and we Union solders are protected behind a stone wall.  No wonder Pickett's guys got mowed down.  Terrible loss.  Lee's returning soldiers pass in front of him.  "It was all my fault men," he tells them.

In our battle discussions, I am frequently surprised to hear how battles end.  Credits, apparently, don’t roll over the sunset at the end of a fighting day.  Generals don’t give chase to solidify victories; exhausted soldiers can’t go on.  Armies slink away at night.  (How do neighing horses, tramping feet and wagon wheels sneak away?)

Tuesday: Gettysburg, Little Round Top and Story-Telling

Throughout our morning on the battlefield, we see Park Service people.  Are they rangers or docents?  Can't tell.  They may be one guy, like Paul, with many of us.  Sometimes we see them huddled with just a couple of people.  Paul is a great story teller and he holds us, rapt, with his skill.

We are a couple miles south of Gettysburg where the Battle of Little Round Top was fought on July 2.  We drive past the Peach Orchard.  We stand on Little Round Top  and imagine Chamberlain (a favorite of our Historian Al) ordering a bayonet charge.  Like the other battlefields, it is at once stirring and disturbing. . .and thrilling to imagine the engagement that ranged across our view.  What a contradiction in my heart!

Disobedience to orders figures here.  Union general Daniel Sickles disobeys his commander, General Meade, about defending Cemetery Ridge and moves his troops to the Emmitsburg Road instead.  Seeing the exposure, another general sends a message to a general to cover Little Round top.  The second disobedience comes when Col. Strong Vincent rides up, assesses the situation and tells the messenger he’s taking responsibility for leaving his orders to take the hill.  There isn’t time for anyone else to get on the scene.  Vincent is killed that day, but the Union was victorious.  Sickles is never court-martialed for his disobedience.  (In our bus discussions, one of the military guys talks about how that often happens, that guys like Sickles often advance!  Curious.)

You know what I wish?  It may already exist.  I can never follow those little blue or red lines snaking across a topographical map at the visitors’ centers.  I wish there was a video version of the war that really showed how all the troops moved, and I could be a goddess-like observer from above. 

We dine tonight at Hers Tavern, which existed at the time of the war.  It's at the edget of the battlefield.

Monday: Antietam and Emancipation

I am distracted on Monday by sad business calls from home, and so watch the group march away to Antietam on 9/17/62 with its loss of 23,000 soldiers (bloodiest day in U.S. battle history), which led the way to the Emancipation Proclamation, whose legal argument I had never before heard.  Because the Constitution permitted slavery, Lincoln would be hard-pressed under it to free slaves. . .except he declared that the South as seceded did not technically come under the Constitution, and he asserted his martial powers.  He announced his order in 1862; it took effect January 1, 1863.  Slaves in the north were freed two years later by the 13^th amendment.

Friday: The Conflict's Waning Days

I, being geographically challenged, had no idea we were THISCLOSE to Williamsburg and Yorktown.  I may never come home.

Today we visited the Museum of the Confederacy, just around the corner from Jefferson Davis' White House in Richmond, which we did not see.  There was a magnificent display of Confederate flags (right next to the magnificent gift shop), and a lesson that the flag I associate with the South's cause was a battle flag, not the official one.

One floor displays uniforms and belongings of various lights, including the sword Lee wore into the Appomattox court house.  (He did not offer it to Grant, and Grant did not request it)  What struck me here at the downstairs "Knickknackery" exhibit is how small and slight everyone was.  I know the war's privations brought some to near starvation, particularly towards the end, where we're currently marching to.  But these weren't tall guys or robust women.  A hard physical life, I'm told.

I loved the downstairs displays:  the doll whose hair concealed an opening for smuggling quinine in its head and chest, the grand painting of Lee and Jackson parting the day the latter is killed by his own men, the homespun dresses and suits, the woven straw hats and hair necklaces, medicines. . .

Racing yet again for the bus.  To be continued.