Early on a summer morning, as the mist gives way to the promise of a hot July day, the fields of Gettysburg are still. Only the birds disturb this quiet place. The tourists will arrive later and cruise the paved roads and stop their cars briefly to read the historic panels or consider a monument before passing on to the next spot where they will pause to try to understand what happened in these fields 150 years ago.
Despite the thousands of books that have been written about the battle, and the hundreds of monuments that dot the fields of Gettysburg, it is sometimes hard to imagine the grim reality of the fierce fight that once raged here and transformed farmland into a battlefield of war.
Peaceful now, the fresh mown grass and meditative quiet are in stark opposition to the wartime accounts of screaming artillery shells, smoke-choked woods, and air filled with deadly lead from thousands of muskets fired in simultaneous volleys. The noise of battle was deafening.
In silence now, it is as if the procession of history has exhaled, giving solace and seeking forgiveness for what once transpired here. Yet in this space, for three scorching days in July of 1863, a battle was fought that altered American history.
The battle at Gettysburg was not planned. The little town of 2,400 residents was not an objective for the two armies that parried in a strategic dance from Virginia and through Maryland and into Pennsylvania to come to this place. But the town was at the center of 10 roads radiating out in all directions. It was where the Confederate General Robert E. Lee could quickly bring his army together once it became clear that the Union army's sleepy pursuit was finally closing in. Historians still debate whether Lee intended to bring battle as part of his invasion strategy. But regardless of intent, the two huge armies stumbled into each other on the morning of July 1, 1863. The battle was joined.
The Confederate army, buoyed by repeated victories, crashed into the fortified Union line on Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 3 in an attack that has come down through history as "Pickett's Charge." The Union line held by just the thinnest of margins and the Confederate army was compelled to retreat.
The Confederate army's grand gamble to end the war with a decisive victory at Gettysburg concluded that afternoon with a grand assault involving 15,000 Southern soldiers over a flat plain that lay between the opposing armies. After marching over a one-mile path in a manner more akin to the war of the old Napoleonic style, the Confederate column smashed into the Union army's battle line on the farm of Abraham Brian, a black freedman, whose small clapboard house still stands.
Brian had purchased the land and this home in 1857. It had taken him nearly 20 years to scrap together the funds from his work as a laborer to buy the 12-acre farm. He had raised five children in the single-story home and had been forced to leave when the Confederate army reached the outskirts of Gettysburg.
News of the arrival presence of Confederate troops had spread fast. Gettysburg's African-American community was well aware that the Confederate army was capturing both freed blacks and escaped slaves with the intent of bringing them back to Virginia and slavery. According to the 1860 census, there were 186 African-Americans living in Gettysburg and about 1,200 in the county. It remains one of the lesser known chapters in the history of the battle that the Confederates took many African-Americans with the army as it retreated to Virginia.
There is irony in that the end of the Confederate invasion of 1863, the climatic conclusion to the battle of Gettysburg, and the beginning of the end of the Confederate cause, took place on land owned by an African-American — a man the Confederacy in fighting so hard to preserve its "peculiar institutions" and culture, was seeking to retain in bondage.
Abraham Brian and his family eluded capture. They returned to their home after the battle to find the house and the surrounding fields were in a deplorable state. The house bore the marks of battle and the crop fields had been churned to mire.
Brian was hired to help bury the dead and earned $1 for each body recovered and interred. In the years after the war, he filed a claim with the federal government for $1,028 in damages to his property. Yet he received only $15 in restitution. He sold the farm in 1869, just 10 years before his death. He is buried in the old African-American burial ground in Gettysburg.
Gettysburg was the high point of the Confederacy. The war would be different after its defeat. That the battle concluded on Abraham Brian's farm and all of the imagery that it conjures, seems strangely appropriate.
The battle claimed nearly 50,000 casualties. In all of those individual stories of hardship and sacrifice, Abraham Brian's story has largely been unknown. Gettysburg was not just another bloody battle in a series of Civil War battles. Gettysburg was the turning point — a desperate fight that helped to determine not only the outcome of the war, but whether the American experiment in democracy would continue. Its landscape is still scarred by the events that took place here.
Its buildings, like those of the freedman Abraham Brian, still bear mute testimony. Gettysburg did not specifically decide the outcome of the war, but it did redirect the course of the war that would ultimately end in a Union victory and destroy the institution of slavery that had haunted America since the earliest days of the republic.
Bill Howard is an author and historian. He lives in Delmar.