Gettysburg Heroes: Perfect Soldiers, Hallowed Ground

11. Memories of Little Round Top

11 Memories of Little Round Top If Lincoln’s Address at Gettysburg not only brought forth a call for a “new birth of freedom,” but also set the sacrifice of the Union soldiers who died there within the emotional context of the nation’s “political religion,” it was the veteran soldiers who actually shaped how subsequent generations of Americans would comprehend what took place in the Civil War’s most bloody battle. Memories, sometimes faded and sometimes vibrant, would recall the actions of perfect heroes on both sides. Out of their memories , and sometimes using their remembrances as an instrument in the reconstruction of history (and thus of their own glory), the old soldiers forged a new meaning for the war and created its lasting legacies. Often these soldiers could not agree as to precisely what had happened to them and their comrades during the war or at specific places like Gettysburg; in other instances, old enemies, Union and Confederate, took up the fight again, battling over the meaning of the Civil War with words instead of bullets. As they looked to the past, the veterans sometimes softened their accounts, not wanting to upset delicate Victorian sensibilities, but just as often the harsh realities of war—its brutality, its inhumanity, its utter disregard for anything that lay in its path—came through with disturbing clarity. Over time, the veterans’ voices grew fainter, less audible, until they finally could no longer be heard at all. In time, too, the landscape of the Civil War changed, so that nothing in our modern world could be found that looked or sounded like it had when the perfect heroes had fought their great war and had given so much of themselves for their causes. For those who tried to scale Little Round Top’s heights at Gettysburg and for those who defended its ledges—including William C. Oates and Joshua Chamberlain and so many others who fought and fell there—this was not a place to be forgotten. But when it came to setting down the history of the battle for all posterity, these veterans could not agree among themselves as to the details or the meaning of the terrible battle in which they had participated. Oliver Norton tried to elevate the memory of his commanding officer, Colonel Strong Vincent, to a place of veneration above all the other perfect heroes of Little Round Top. Oates and Cham- Memories of Little Round Top 173 berlain, as we have seen, could not agree as to the place where a monument should be raised to the 15th Alabama, and so, in the end, no monument to that regiment was ever erected on the hill at all. It is in the story of Oates’s failed efforts to erect that monument, and to get the Gettysburg National Military Park officially to honor his fallen Confederate comrades, that we may begin to understand why the veterans staked so much on their memories and made such a concerted effort after the war to honor their brethren, lost and living, on the old battlefields. It involved much more than Chamberlain ’s ego, Norton’s hero worship of Vincent, or Oates’s own feelings of pride or loss. The veterans—like Chamberlain and Oates and Norton— wanted something more than ethereal words, something more tangible than the brief sentences Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg or the sentiments that the veterans themselves expressed on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, to mark their deeds and validate their memories. They wanted something in stone to salute their courage and acknowledge how their lives had been forever changed in the awful ordeal of battle. The old soldiers, like Oates and Chamberlain, wanted to become immortalized; they wanted monuments that would let them, in a sense, live forever.1 * * * When William C. Oates returned to Gettysburg long after the smoke of the battle had cleared, the slopes of Little Round Top looked unfamiliar and strange to him.As he walked the ground where his men had fought for more than an hour trying unsuccessfully to dislodge Chamberlain’s regiment from its strong defensive position, he did discover trees still scared by the gashes of bullets, but some of those trees were located in places where Oates could not remember any fighting ever happening. Even after visiting the battlefield four times in the years following Appomattox, he still was forced to admit that the topography of Little Round Top, with all its boulders and ledges and...