Gettysburg, Shelby Foote and the 4th

I just read Shelby Foote's "Stars in Their Courses." That's not actually a complete book. It's a very small segment of the middle volume of a three volume history of the American Civil War. I hope someday to read the entire thing.

This has become something of a minor obsession for me lately. A few weekends ago I visited Gettysburg for the first time. It's an amazing place. Nowhere that I've been to is quite like it. I could go on for pages and pages about why Gettysburg is so important, why it's so meaningful, why the place is so affecting. But other, better writers have already done that, and if you care at all about the subject, you'd do well to read any of them.

Shelby Foote, would be a good first choice.

He was a gifted writer. His words do what every writer attempts, and what few ever achieve. They do not merely describe, they evoke. Both transcedent beauty and horrific suffering, and every shade in between. He weaves an epic tale, all the more touching because it is no tale, as he reminds the reader every few pages by digressing -- never for long and never without good reason -- with personal stories about the men who fought and died all those years ago.

As the Fourth of July draws to a rainy close here in North Jersey, Shelby Foote has me thinking. That's what we should have been talking about today. That's the point. But all day, while HBO ran a "John Adams" marathon and one of the other cable channels ran all the episodes of "The American Revolution" series back-to-back, I didn't see a single mention of the Civil War, let alone Gettysburg, which was fought on the first 3 days of July.

That's a shame, because an understanding of the Civil War is essential to an understanding of the United States. The freedoms that were won during the Revolution, the freedoms proclaimed by Jefferson and the men in Philadelphia on this date 232 years ago, marked only the beginning of the story. In many important ways, the ultimate success of that revolution wasn't realized until the Civil War, and no one moment better encapsulates the Civil War than the Battle of Gettysburg itself.

Shelby Foote summed it up so well, with one statement that everyone should know about the U.S.

Before the Civil War people would typically say "The United States are..." After the war however, and ever since, people say "The Unites States is..." And that's what the war meant at it's most basic level. That's what all the blood spilled and the suffering endured at places like Gettysburg achieved. Foote says, as only he could: "the war made us an is."

The Fourth of July marks the date when a group of sovereign states came together to end their collective rule from London. But it was only many years later that those several states truly became what we are now, one single nation.