Vanessa Vick for The New York Times
Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, in Charlottesville, Va.
You can almost see them, spectral figures moving through thick forest, ragged, rugged men who endured astonishing hardship just to get here, creeping with their muskets in the sticky haze of a July morning in central Pennsylvania's Appalachian Mountains. They wouldn't even know the name of this place, Gettysburg. Yet their blood would become the ink that sets down the town's name for history.
It is a cast of tens of thousands, generals and infantry, civilians, horses, even dogs.
This was the vision that lodged in my mind as I drove through Gettysburg, the first stop on a winter tour of historic sites in four states.
The trip was an effort to become better acquainted with early-19th-century America. The details of this dramatic period, dominated by a nascent country swiftly rived by a civil war over slavery, have entered popular and political discourse with force in recent years, from Oscar-nominated films like "Lincoln" to a presidential election year in which candidates seemed to be essentially debating "What would the founders do?" At the same time, a proliferation of 150-year anniversaries for Civil War battles — including Gettysburg's this year — have given the topic new life. My knowledge of history was as glancing as any non-historian's, and I hoped that a tour would prove revelatory.
So I set off with my family, using Gettysburg Battlefield as an entry point. We made our way to stations numbered to correspond with an auto tour along a network of roads that wrap around the 6,000-acre preserve in south-central Pennsylvania. Despite its name, it is actually a vast series of battlefields across a landscape that is backstopped by the Appalachian Mountains to the west, and ripples eastward in a series of ridges, hillocks, forests and creeks, with expansive fields and meadows between them.
At the time of the battle, Gettysburg was a small county seat. But all roads ran through it, including the roads that brought troops from all directions. The National Park Service's mandate is to keep the landscape as close as possible to what it was in 1863. The exception is the 1,400 monuments and markers that make it the world's largest sculpture garden.
As we drove the tour route, it was eventually possible to ignore the contradiction of driving an industrial-era creation around a park meant to summon the Civil War. This was mostly because we were listening to the surprisingly cinematic narration on a set of CDs called the Gettysburg Story Battlefield Auto Tour that we bought at the visitors' center. We became transfixed listening to the stories as we surveyed the places they took place. They're haunting, some with coincidences so eerie they can seem mystical.
Consider: At the start of the Western Hemisphere's bloodiest battle — as many as 51,000 killed, wounded or missing over three days — a New York regiment subdued another from Alabama. Each unit had a brother named Schwartz who hadn't seen each other since emigrating from Germany years earlier. At this battlefield, they fell into each other's arms. The Confederate Schwartz was taken prisoner, the Yankee Schwartz sent back out to fight — and a short time later, having embraced his brother so briefly, was shot dead in battle.
Every so often we would pause the CD to get out and climb to some lookout, either on a hilltop or one of the towers that had been erected to give visitors a view that will help them understand the movement of troops. There's a certain paradox about Gettysburg's landscape. It's very quiet and peaceful. There are no billboards. Traffic moves slowly. But there is also an acute awareness of what happened here, so its serenity is the serenity of a cemetery. And of course when we got back into the car we turned the CD back on, and it was like watching the battle resume.
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