THE LESSON OF THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG, JULY 1863: THE

CHAMPIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS CAN DEFEAT THE DEFENDERS OF PROPERTY

By Chris Mahin

Exactly 134 years ago this month, in the heat of a Pennsylvania

summer, two armies fought a battle for the soul of America. By the

time their bloodletting was done, tens of thousands of men lay

dead -- and America had been changed forever.

On July 1, 1863, those two armies clashed at a place called

Gettysburg. What happened there has important lessons for today.

One army entered Gettysburg as an invader. The soldiers of the

Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia were white, Protestant and

English-speaking. That army had a cause. The very fact that it was

invading the North that summer proved that it was not fighting for

"states' rights" or "Southern independence" or any of the other

nice-sounding lies told by its defenders. No, this army was

defending the most ignoble cause ever championed by men in arms.

It was fighting to preserve the selling of little children on

auction blocks, the whipping of women, and the systematic working

to death of young men. The Confederate States of America had

initiated the Civil War not to preserve slavery in the South, but

to extend it to the North. In June of 1863, the Army of Northern

Virginia had moved north to start that process.

But on July 1, 1863, the Confederate infantry ran into the advance

units of a very different army. This army was made of volunteers.

Unlike the Confederates, it consisted of people of different

nationalities, and included immigrants from many parts of the

world. The Union's Army of the Potomac was composed of farmers'

sons from Maine and Michigan and office workers from New York and

Philadelphia.

This army also had a cause. Two years before Gettysburg, at the

beginning of the Civil War, most soldiers in the Union army had

been fighting simply to re-unite the United States. They believed

that the secession of the slave states was illegal and wrong. But

as the war dragged on, the Union soldiers gradually began to see

that their fate was inextricably bound up with the fate of the

slave -- and that the illegal rebellion of the slaveholders simply

could not be crushed without crushing slavery itself.

Then, seven months before Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln

issued the Emancipation Proclamation. That act made the moral

positions of the two armies as distinct as the battle lines they

eventually set up on two different ridges just south of the town

of Gettysburg. One army fought for slavery, the other for freedom.

One army fought for the "sacredness" of property rights, even when

property rights guaranteed misery for 4 million people; the other

army fought to stop 347,000 slaveowners from imposing their will

on 30 million residents of the United States.

Those differences were decisive. While the battle itself raged for

three long days, left tens of thousands dead or wounded, and

included the longest bombardment by cannons ever to have taken

place thus far in the history of North America, it was not the

Napoleon cannons of the Union army (or the not-very-brilliant

generalship of George Gordon Meade) which won the battle for the

Union. Every honest account of the battle pays tribute to the

steadfastness of the Union soldiers at Gettysburg, soldiers who

went about the work calmly because they knew what they were

fighting for and were willing to die for it.

Here are the words of Lt. Frank Haskell of Wisconsin, a

participant:

"Men are dropping dead or wounded on all sides by scores and by

hundreds; and poor mutilated creatures -- some with an arm

dangling, some with a leg broke by a bullet -- are limping and

crawling toward the rear. They make no sound of complaint or pain,

but are as silent as if dumb and mute. A sublime heroism seems to

pervade all and the intuition that to lose that crest and all is

lost."

An unforgettable example of that heroism came on the battle's

second day. At that point, the very end of the Union battle line

was positioned on a small rocky hill south of the town of

Gettysburg called Little Round Top. There, a regiment of

volunteers from Maine commanded by a college professor fought

desperately to prevent the Confederate forces from surrounding

them. If the Confederates had succeeded, they would have been able

to attack the entire Union line from behind. When the soldiers of

the 20th Maine ran out of ammunition, they simply fixed bayonets

and attacked, driving the Confederate soldiers off the hill.

Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the commander of the 20th Maine

regiment, summed up that kind of situation well when he said: "The

inspiration of a noble cause enables men to do things they did not

dream themselves capable of before."

When the three days of hard fighting finally ended, the officers'

corps of the Confederate army had been devastated. The Army of

Northern Virginia retreated. While the Civil War dragged on for

almost two more years, its final result had already been

determined.

In total, 23,000 Union soldiers were killed, wounded or missing in

action at Gettysburg. Most of them were young. All of them were

volunteers. (The Union did not begin drafting men until later in

1863.) These men sacrificed to stop an economic elite which cared

nothing about morality from taking control of this country. All of

us owe a great debt to those who gave their lives at Gettysburg in

1863 to ensure that the United States would continue to exist, and

would not become a country in which 347,000 slaveowners gave

orders to everyone else. But that gratitude must not blind us from

ignoring the fact that today the United States is becoming a

country in which a small handful of millionaires and billionaires

give orders to everyone else.

Perhaps the best way that we can honor those who fell in

freedom's cause at Gettysburg would be to help finish their work

-- by creating a United States without any capitalist exploiters,

whether slaveowner or otherwise.

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This article originated in the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition),

Vol. 24 No. 7/ July, 1997; P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL

60654; Email: pt@noc.org; http://www.mcs.com/~jdav/league.html

Feel free to reproduce and use unless marked as copyrighted. The

PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE depends on donations from its readers.

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