It was the second year of the Clinton Presidency, a sweltering summer, when in the month of July 1994, I visited to the town of Gettysburg and its famous Civil War battle site.
It was a time when the ‘Washington Consensus’ was at its peak. The Soviet Union and the communist regimes of Eastern Europe had collapsed, Francis Fukuyama had declared ‘the end of history’ and the United States was at the center of a unipolar world spawning more and more democracies.
Not long before, OJ Simpson had been arrested for two murders, the FIFA World Cup was won by Brazil, the first time the event was held in the US and the Hollywood success, ‘The Lion King’ had just been released.
Working in Washington DC at the time as a representative of a British oil and gas company, my general interest in history and a fascination with the US Civil War impelled me on the interstate to Pennsylvania one Saturday afternoon.
Accompanying me was an old school friend, Robert Barber, who at the time, was working on a short-term contract for a Chinese businessman in New York and had travelled down to Washington for a weekend visit.
As a recently retired army officer, Robert was probably the ideal person to be accompanied by on a visit to the famous battlefield. Having served in the British Army as a major in the Brigade of Gurkhas, he was a mine of knowledge and enthusiasm as we embarked on our journey.
The first observation we both made was how well Americans ‘do’ commemorative battle sites. I had already visited a number of sites in Virginia, notably Bull Run (Manassas) and was impressed by the organizational excellence, the attention to detail and the overall positive visitor experience.
From the provision of cassette tapes to listen to as one drove the course of the battle site, to the neat sharpness and gleaming buttons on the park rangers’ uniforms, the experience spoke pride and excellence. Coming from a 1990s United Kingdom where those qualities were not always in evidence in the public realm, Gettysburg was a pleasant eye-opener. Second rate clearly doesn’t work in America, I mused.
As students of history, we were up to date on the basic outline of the 1863 battle, its consequences and implications. Delving deeper into the detailed history of the three-day battle and aftermath on its ‘hallowed ground’ was enlightening and enjoyable.
Although both of us had been working in the UK, we both attended the same high school in the mid-west of Ireland where the education was good and inspiring. We probably had a head start on others with our background knowledge of international history which was bolstered by Robert’s hands-on military experience and strategic military knowledge.
Being Irish, we inevitably savored the knowledge that the ‘Fighting Irish’ 69th Brigade fought bravely for the Union at the battle. Further, we noted that the Brigade’s battle flag was presented to the Irish Houses of Parliament by President John F. Kennedy 100 years after the battle during the President’s 1963 visit to Ireland. Five months later, the President was to fall victim to an assassin’s bullets, not unlike the fate of his predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, who played such an iconic role at Gettysburg following the battle.
As a learning tool, the car cassette which provided moment by moment information on key locations of the battlefield was instructive and to us at the time, innovative. It seemed an effective ‘action learning’ tool which involved us in the process in a way that listening to a dry speech by a guide would have lacked.
Similarly, I noted how the experience was no exposition of triumphalism by the victors seeking to denigrate the Confederate losers of the battle. The drama, horror and heroism of the day was presented in a way that stuck closely to the unifying ethos of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Adress and which, in practice, helped heal wounds as the Union reconstructed itself.
Few could have come away from such a visit not recognizing the significance of the battle for the United States. The farthest north which Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had waged war – that far and no farther- Gettysburg was the point after which it all unraveled for Lee and the Confederate cause. Like Stalingrad and El-Alamein in World War Two, it was the beginning of the end.
To outsiders like us, it was not only a journey through US history but more broadly, a revealing insight into how important and cherished its history is to the American people.
