During our first visit to Gettysburg, a month after the centenary of the battle, my brother and I went in search of a dead man or at least the place where he died. We had seen the photo of the Confederate sharpshooter taken in Devil’s Den by a former photographer for Mathew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan. The rebel was a young man lying on his back in a sniper’s nest of lichen-covered boulders, with a rifle leaning against them – a scene at least partially staged, we know now, by the photographer. Behind the dead man, rocks are stacked in a makeshift wall.
We had been
following the hundred-year commemoration of the war, reading Bruce Catton,
Fletcher Pratt and Life magazine. Somewhere
we saw O’Sullivan’s photo, possibly in National Geographic. We were boys safely removed in time and space from the war zone. War was romantic. We collected Civil War cards as though battles
were baseball games, though we sensed Gettysburg was sacred ground.
Today is
perhaps the most important date in American history. July 3, 1863 was the third
and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, culminating in Pickett’s Charge. Melville
describes the attack in his poem “Gettysburg: The Check (July, 1863)” (Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War,
1866):
“He charged,
and in that charge condensed
His
all of hate and all of fire;
He sought to
blast us in his scorn,
And
wither us in his ire.
Before him
went the shriek of shells-
Aerial
screamings, taunts and yells;
Then the
three waves in flashed advance
Surged,
but were met, and back they set:
Pride was
repelled by sterner pride,
And
Right is a strong-hold yet.”
The late
poet Helen Pinkerton adds another layer of historical
resonance to our understanding of Melville and the Civil War. In her dramatic dialogue “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell” (Taken in Faith, 2002), she channels
Melville’s voice much as Melville channeled Robert E. Lee’s in “Lee in the Capitol (April, 1866)”:
“. . . at Antietam,
When the red
sun seemed almost to go backward,
So slow the
day, so endless seemed the firing;
The heights
of Fredericksburg, where Cobb’s men saw
Our blue
ranks melt like snow, and the living piled
The frozen
dead as breastworks; in Stonewall’s storms
At Manassas
and Chancellorsville; in the three great acts
At
Gettysburg.”
Rosanna
Warren writes of Melville’s Civil War poems: “[T]he knowledge that counts most,
I think, is tragic knowledge; so I find myself returning to those ancestral
battlefields to try to understand where we have come from. All Americans are
children of the Civil War whether we know it or not.”
My brother
and I never found Devil’s Den.
[I inherited
Helen Pinkerton’s copy of Melville’s Battle-Pieces
and Aspects of the War, the Prometheus Books edition published in 2001. The
quote above from Rosanna Warren is taken from her essay included in the volume,
“Dark Knowledge: Melville’s Poems of the Civil War.”]
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