American History Hit - The Crossfire of Gettysburg

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Gettysburg is synonymous with the bloodiest battle in the history of the United States. But before it was the location of a battle and Lincoln's arguably most famous speech, Gettysburg was a town.In this episode, Don is joined by Andrew Dalton, executive director of the Adams County Historical Society. They explore the story of Gettysburg and its people, their experiences in the battle, and the lasting effects of the Civil War on the town.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Teän Stewart-Murray. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 1860. We are in our house in the county seat of Adams County, Pennsylvania, where it is peaceful and prosperous.

Ten roads intersect right here in town, and this community thrives. There are banks, taverns, stables, carriage workshops, shoemakers supplied by tanneries down by the creek. Fertile farm fields surround us. It's Gensburg. It is a good and lucky town, an industrious town, but it is just a town, a nice place to raise a family. The 2400 citizens walk our streets with deliberate intent. Merchants supply our needs. Business is done daily.

Church is attended faithfully. The town center hums with chatter and the clip-clopping of force hooves provides an even cadence to life. Who would possibly conceive that in a matter of a few short years, it will all be shattered in a cataclysmic battle? Hello and welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for joining us.

It is a fact of war that the people who suffer most, in any conflict or ultimately, and sometimes immediately, those without the guns. That is, the civilian population. Just look at the terrible news from Ukraine these days, how the people who live in those villages, towns, and cities are the ones so often terrorized and without recourse or escape, who live in mortal horror that they will be targeted next. Or if they do get away before the shooting starts or the bombs begin to fall, eventually it's the civilians who must return to a devastated war zone and try to rebuild,

their lives and property to pick up where they left off if they haven't decided to leave altogether. War takes prisoners a plenty. But the fighters are usually released, where the civilians remain trapped in or out of their homes until life returns to some kind of normal, if such a thing can exist after you've seen people die in your own streets or in your farm fields. This was certainly the case in July 1863 at the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. Gettysburg wasn't a planned battleground. But the lands around the town became the scene of first a series of skirmishes, which swiftly developed into one of the worst scenes of death and carnage and mayhem in which any American force has ever been engaged. Never mind. This was Americans fighting Americans.

The townspeople of Gettysburg were the ones who had to sort it all out for themselves in the end and for their struggling nation. A new immersive museum exists in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania that explores this unfortunate reality. And it's called Gettysburg Beyond the Battle Museum. And we have the museum founder with us today, Andrew Dalton. Welcome to the podcast. Hello, Andrew. Thanks, Don.

It's great to be here. We have made this July 4th week all about Gettysburg, the 160th anniversary and all. And the previous episode was about the events to combat. How this thing unfolded. Today we're going to talk more about context. Is that okay with you? Sure. Yep.

Your featured exhibition is one of the featured exhibition, is caught in the crossfire. Describe for me what this captures and why. Why do you want to make this place? Well, we really wanted to give people an idea of what it was like for the approximately 2,400 civilians of Gettysburg who were sheltering in place in many cases during the battle. And, you know, it was a three-day long battle. There were 160,000 soldiers that descended on this very small community, and the civilians were caught in the middle. And many of them were victims in one way or another. And so that is what we wanted to do. We created a house where people actually enter a room that's caught in the middle of the battle and they hear and see and feel what it was like.

It is an insane scene that happens to Gettysburg. How is it that Gettysburg ended up in the crossfire, as you say? This is a battle fought in a northern town where an invading Confederate army overtakes the streets and enters the homes of these civilians. And so in our museum, we wanted to actually put people in that scene. And we went out and recorded live sounds at a shooting range to get the actual sounds that these people would have heard using period weapons. When we used a treasure trove of letters and diaries and newspaper articles from our collection here at the Adams County Historical Society to put this exhibit together and to really bring this experience to life. The people of Gettysburg, ironically, become the storytellers of this battle, don't they? They are eyewitnesses to history.

Absolutely. They, you know, and many of them were children and lived into the 1930s, 40s, and even into the 1950s. It's kind of hard to imagine, but we're so closely tied to this period in American history, just separated by a few generations. But it was an absolutely traumatic experience for these people. You imagine having your farm completely destroyed. Your house is used as a hospital. There are soldiers buried right outside your back door. And this lasted for weeks and months after the fact, not to mention the actual three days of the battle, which were an incredibly traumatic time for these people in their lives that they would never forget. Let's talk about Gettysburg before the war. I mean, what kind of

place is this? It's a very established town, right? Yeah, it was founded in 1786, and it really was an important place. There are 10 roads that converge at Gettysburg were only about 70 miles, 80 miles from Washington, D.C. So it's also only eight miles from the Mason-Dixon line, which separates the north and the south, the Pennsylvania, Maryland border. So, There's divided attitudes here, but it's a small community, but still very central in southern Pennsylvania, connected to some of the bigger cities. And there was a carriage industry, actually, that was thriving before the Civil War that connected our local community with a lot of the South, Virginia and Maryland. And so there was trade and a lot of relationships, even familial relationships over that line.

And we're two years into the war-ish at this point. How has the Civil War affected Gettysburg as a northern town? Well, hundreds of men, local men went off and served at different battles throughout the first two years of the war. The absolute worst nightmare for these people was a Confederate invasion of the North. And there was talk and rumors and fear about this for the entire period of the war, starting in 1861. But it all came home in 1863 when the Confederates launched an invasion of the North, crossed the Potomac River, entered Pennsylvania with a goal of threatening the northern capital in Washington and winning a victory in the North. They were not able to do that, but it was still a very, it was a dicey and uncertain time for these people. They didn't know what the outcome would be.

You mentioned it's 10 roads. I mean, this is a nexus for a lot of transport in those days. Was it a given that they would be the focus of this attack? Not at all, no. And both armies sort of used this road network to converge upon a meeting place. And it turned out that the battle unfolded because of these roads converging at one place. And so Gettysburg ended up the scene of the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere. Yeah.

Had they taken any kind of precautions about this? I'm curious if towns like Gettysburg that were so close to the border, did they build any kind of defenses? A little bit. The Pennsylvania militia tried what they could to hold the Confederates off. In fact, there was a group of local men who went out and felled trees to try to stop the Confederate advance. But there really wasn't much that they could do, especially because the local men had gone off and served. was an all-volunteer army for the most part, the Union Army. So a lot of the men of the age that they'd be in the military were actually off with the Union Army in Virginia, in Maryland,

trying to come into Pennsylvania and defeat Robert Ely's army. Sure. And you're so close to Maryland here, which itself is a sort of divided land. I guess there were a lot of divided attitudes within Gettysburg even, I suppose, right? There were. And actually in 1860, Abraham Lincoln won Adams County Pennsylvania, which is the county, Gettysburg's located in by only six votes. So it was a very divided area, and especially over the issues of slavery, over states' rights, over the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, and a lot of different attitudes here, and especially because of those familial and business relationships with Maryland and Virginia. Yeah, you mentioned local men going away. How difficult to imagine that this war is suddenly heading up towards their community.

Did a lot of Gettysburg men serve in the Battle of Gettysburg? Only one company, so about 100 men from Adams County, Pennsylvania, from Gettysburg, actually ended up returning and fighting with the Union Army at Gettysburg. And their stories are incredible. In fact, one of them was mortally wounded and brought to his mother's house and cared for by his mother and died in his own home. But I don't think anyone really imagined that this would get so close to home. And especially for the local residents, some of them, you know, they had brothers and

and fathers who were knocking on their doors as the Union Army entered Gettysburg on the first day of the battle. But I would say for the citizens of Gettysburg, the most traumatic period of time was on the first day of the battle. The Confederates drove. About 20,000 Union soldiers were driven back, chased by about 30,000 Confederates through the streets of town, with 2,000 or so civilians hiding in their cellars. Just imagining this scene, this is really the pivot point of the battle when it appears that the Confederates have the upper hand. Now, over the next two days, the tide shifts. But this is the moment, especially for us in our museum, we wanted to capture what it was like for these civilians as the town is overrun by Confederates. There's no such thing as an undramatic battle, but it is the presence of civilian population that makes it even more so here in Gettysburg.

And especially because the record is so complete as to what happened. It's being watched by everyone and lived by those who were there. This is a good chance for us to listen in on the soundscape that you guys have created, which you recorded. with real gunfire, et cetera. So you're immersing the listener, the museum goer in your case, in the world of these citizens of Gettysburg. Let's listen in. My God.

The rebels are here. They're everywhere. Our boys are gone. God protect us. Well, look at here. You folks just sit tight. Your Yankees have done right off. Wow. Okay. So that's the sense that you get of people hiding in their basements, of talking among themselves. It's not, sadly, so different than what we see on the news right now, you know, with people hiding out all over the place in Kiev and so forth. This is the sad fact of war. I mean, these people are caught right in the middle of it all.

That's right. And there were about 30 civilian casualties. That's something that's not talked about very much in Gettysburg. But there were several killed and wounded during the battle itself. Others were killed afterwards handling unexploded. artillery shells that detonated in their hands and others died of disease. There was rampant disease in the area after the battle. You imagine 7,000 dead bodies and tens of thousands of wounded. Every water source was contaminated. There's thousands of horses killed and their carcasses laying all around the fields, farm fields. And so it was a public health crisis. It was an economic crisis. And it was really a psychological crisis for these people who had to live with the memories of this for the rest of their lives. This was a prosperous town. lovely houses, I would imagine for the day. How much destruction takes place, physical properties lost?

Quite a bit. On the southern edge of town, there was actually a fierce sharpshooter battle throughout the fighting on July 2nd and mostly July 3rd. And in the middle of that, one local civilian, a 20-year-old woman named Jenny Wade was killed in her home. A bullet crashed through the door and killed her instantly. But many of the houses were badly damaged by artillery shells, by cannonballs that just went straight through the brick, through the walls, and bullet damage. you can still see many houses in Gettysburg today that are damaged and some that still have artillery projectiles sticking out of them. I'll be right back with more from American History Hit and Andrew Dalton after this break. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the Warfare podcast from History Hit.

Join me twice a week every week as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the ones shaping our future. We talk to award-winning journalists. ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We hear from the people who were actually there. The Sudanese have been incredible. They have managed to get supplies to people, to individuals who are suffering.

And we learn from the remarkable historians shining a light on forgotten histories. For the most part, the millions of people who were taken to those, camp were immediately murdered. Auschwitz combined the functions of death camp and concentration camp and slave labor. Join us on the warfare podcast from a history hits twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. I want to get a sense of how in real time this was going for these people. Was the Union Army, were the military leadership there, you know, instructing them on what to do? Were they protecting them? How was that handled? When the Confederate Army captured Gettysburg, The Union Army was cut off from the town, and so the civilians had to fend for themselves and really weren't given much assistance.

The Confederates, in many cases, ransacked houses, stole goods and supplies and really terrified the local population. I mean, that had been the original reason that the Confederates were even headed in this direction, was to get supplies, was to ransack houses, I suppose, and get shoes, apparently. That seems to be the mythological reason for the whole battle. in the aftermath, or I guess in between, I guess as it's going on, these guys, these civilians are forced to act in ways that they never saw coming. Are they enlisted in these duties or how do they become involved in the nursing and the hospitals and cleaning up and so forth? Well, this is all before federal agencies like FEMA that would come in and assist with a disaster recovery. So it was entirely left up to the civilians of Gettysburg to deal with the aftermath. They became nurses, volunteer nurses. Every home was a hospital of some kind in the town, and they

helped bury the dead. Actually, the gruesome task of moving a lot of these bodies to the new cemetery that was established was done by Gettysburg's black community. Thousands of bodies moved to the cemetery that would eventually be dedicated in November by Abraham Lincoln with his Gettysburg address. But the local population had to learn very fast how to deal with these circumstances. And many of them, you know, dealt with disease and some had to wear, many, in fact, wore a cloths over their noses, masks of a sort to try to mask the smell. So between the Confederate defeat, their retreat and the famous Gettysburg address, there's a number of months there, about four months, during which time did the people of

Gettysburg understand their place in history? Did they understand what they had gone through? I think they did. In fact, you know, in some sense, they understood the operational. opportunity that would come out of it. Immediately, visitors started descending on Gettysburg from all around the country. It was an immediate tourist destination, and that continues to this day. There are millions of people every year that visit Gettysburg. But I do think they understood the significance, and many took it upon themselves to record their memories very soon after the fact. There are letters, there are diaries. People held on to keepsakes, relics that they had found, and these were precious mementos of what they had gone through. But I do think that they realized,

even before the Gettysburg Address, that they were part of something very significant. The tipping point, if you will, of the entire war feels like at that point, you know, they were coming off a high point, the Southern troops, to come in and lose so convincingly and then have to go all the way back down south. Seems like the end of all that northern excursion. Those people must have felt quite proud of themselves, I would imagine, having been there at the moment. Absolutely. We'll picture this. It's actually the Fourth of July when the Union Army marches back into the streets of Gettysburg after the defeat of the Confederates the day before. Pickets charge, a very famous moment in American history.

But the civilians, they draped flags off the sides of buildings. They came out in the streets to cheer. It was still not extremely safe. There were Confederates sort of on the other end of town. So the celebration was limited to an extent. But it was the 4th of July. The Union Army was back in the streets of Gettysburg. And the people were able to take a deep breath and understand that they had survived.

And one point I'd like to make, too, these people had no idea what the outcome of the battle would be. And they had no idea, if the Union Army was defeated at Gettysburg, the consequences of that for the Union Army, for the war effort for Abraham Lincoln, were absolutely astronomical. And so not knowing what the outcome would be, that's something we try to really stress when people are here at the museum, that they did not know what would happen. They didn't know if the town would be burned. They didn't know if they'd survive. How did you get the idea to start a museum like this? Well, we are the county historical society, and so we have all of these stories from local civilians, all the letters and diaries. We have over a million historic items in our collection. And this is really a gap in the story that's often overlooked or downplayed. And the civilian experience, especially now, I think, is so important to understand, as you mentioned, with world events like what's happening in Ukraine, what's happening in parts of Africa and the Middle East, these are the real victims of war. The innocent bystanders who are forced to, take action and to assist with the recovery and the cleanup. And that's what we wanted to show that this community is really extraordinary,

having only a few thousand people at the time going through such an incredible period in American history and becoming one of the most famous tourist destinations in the world. It's 160 years since the Battle of Gettysburg. This museum is brand new. It places you right in the middle of the battle quite intentionally. and I really encourage people who are visiting this summer, I'm certain a lot are, with their families to go see this museum as an important part of the entire experience. It's called the Gettysburg Beyond the Battle Museum,

and the specific exhibition we're talking about is caught in the crossfire, but there's much more to the museum than just that as well. Thank you so much, Andrew. This is really interesting. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you, Don. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. So glad you could join us.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please let us know. We thrive on your feedback and your reviews. And check out the ever-growing list of back episodes of more American History hit. Episodes drop twice weekly, Mondays, and Thursdays. I'm Don Wildman, and I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.