Gettysburg Getaway

I recently took a day trip to Gettysburg with the other intern in the office where I work. We made a list of things we wanted to do while we were on this side of the country and Gettysburg was definitely not a wrong choice.

I love history for one reason... it's all stories, stories about real people, real families, real men and women who made decisions that we remember today. Unfortunately for our planning, we didn't plan ahead for a walking tour or a battlefield tour that really do a great job of telling the story of Gettysburg.

But for whatever reason, we did schedule a ghost tour. And I learned so much from that ghost tour you wouldn't believe it. (The picture above is of the cemetery in Gettysburg where our ghost touring began) Our guide told us all about the battle line-up, who was involved and who can still be seen, heard and smelled around that town as they "haunt" it. We walked from the hill where armies sheltered themselves from the enemy, through a neighborhood and to Pickett's charge. We learned about the generals who can still be sighted pacing over battlefield decisions, and an old woman who stayed in the midst of the battle to bake bread to feed starving soldiers, people say they can still smell her bread at times, and of soldiers who have been known to "travel" with passersby on their journey home. The reality of the Civil War and the magnitude of people and families it affected really hit me on that ghost tour.

On our drive home we discussed the real reason why the South was fighting, mainly for their wealth, for their way of life. The South was very wealthy before South Carolina seceded from the Union and started down the path to Civil War, and it depended on slave labor to keep that wealth. Meanwhile, the North was a thriving and growing industrial center specializing in manufacturing of Southern materials like cotton. That is valuable information to consider when discussing the Civil War, and am sad to say that day was the first I had heard of it, my teachers never told me that. It adds humanity to the southern side that is completely stripped in most tales of the Civil War... not that their reasoning was justifiable, but it wasn't just about slavery. My friend and I spoke of how the effects of the war can still be seen in the South, where many parts of "the deep south" (and we know the difference, she's from Georgia and I went to Auburn) are still struggling in education, jobs, and the imminent racial divide. The South was demolished since most of the war was fought on Confederate soil, their way of life was completely taken away and after the war, things didn't simply fix themselves. We forget that our country is so young, that the Civil War happened just 150 years ago and it's no surprise that parts of our country are still recovering from that war let alone the others that have happened since.

-GD