It was 145 years ago today that one of the more heroic and decisive – if also perhaps too well-known – actions in our nation’s Civil War took place. If you’ve seen the movie Gettysburg, then you know just what I’m talking about: The daring and desperate charge by the 20th Maine volunteer infantry regiment from its position on the far left flank of the Union line.
Led by Colonel (and future Governor) Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the 20th Maine swung down Little Round Top in the late afternoon of July 2 and captured numerous members of a Confederate raiding force that threatened a critical breakthrough in its own desperate Pennsylvania invasion. Chamberlain and the 20th Maine’s successful counter-charge played a pivotal role in setting the stage for General Robert E. Lee to dare the ill-fated Pickett’s Charge the following day.
Huzzah to Colonel Chamberlain and his 358 men, 131 of whom were killed or wounded atop Little Round Top that day. And to other lesser known regiments who paid an especially brutal price in the three-day fight at Gettsyburg, especially the 24th Michigan and 1st Minnesota.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYYSO7BwjEQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOhNRu6gLBg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x837DHclngI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhSugr22d0U&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlag4rIXI2Q
But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—”that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary. (H.L. Mencken on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.)
One mo’:
http://coloradoconfederatarian.squarespace.com/journal/2008/7/3/ben-degrow-is-all-agog-over-th-annerversry-of-an-important-y.html