Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories by Kelly C. Brian

Author:Kelly, C. Brian [Kelly, C. Brian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Gettysburg Facts, Stats

WHERE MORE THAN THIRTEEN HUNDRED MEMORIALS AND COMMEMORATIVE markers now stand in one central area, the Union fielded 246 infantry regiments for the famous Battle of Gettysburg, along with thirty-eight cavalry regiments and sixty-eight artillery batteries. Drawn up in opposition on the Confederate side were 167 infantry regiments (plus two small batteries), twenty-eight cavalry regiments (and again a battalion), and sixty-seven artillery batteries.

The Union men came from units representing eighteen states, including Maryland, in addition to the ranks of the Nation’s Regular Army. The Confederate units hailed from twelve states, again including Maryland, whose people were divided in their loyalties.

Accessible to visitors today is a federally owned and maintained national park of 3,874 acres, including the twenty-two-acre national cemetery that Abe Lincoln dedicated with a short speech only a few months after the battle took place. For it, of course, was here that he delivered the Gettysburg Address.

Also heavily trodden—and bloodied, too—during the three-day battle of July 1863 were twelve thousand adjoining acres. Next door to the military park and cemetery is the Eisenhower National Historic Site, the farm to which “Ike” (also of military and battle fame) retired after his twentieth-century presidency.

Thirty miles of paved roads wind through the park among the thirteen hundred–plus markers and memorials, past dozens of Civil War cannons and forty-five historic structures predating the battle. At one end, also maintained by the National Park Service as a “living history” project, is John Slyder’s “Granite Farm” of Civil War vintage.

After Lincoln’s dedicatory remarks in November of 1863, the new national cemetery was available for the reburial of Union men who had fallen in the battle itself. Nearly thirty-six hundred bodies from the battlefields were reinterred in sections set aside by states (with space for the Regular Army men and 979 “unknowns” as well). By far the most “populous” state section in the cemetery holding those early burials was New York’s, with 867 bodies reburied. The smallest such grouping was that of Abe Lincoln’s home state, Illinois, with only six bodies dug up and reinterred.

From its Confederate Avenue to the many Confederate monuments scattered about, the battlefield park also includes tributes to the Confederacy. “Alabamians!” says one of the Confederate memorials, “Your names are inscribed on fame’s immortal scroll.”

Union General Samuel W. Crawford, who had begun the war as an army surgeon posted at Fort Sumter, contributed to the great memorial park by purchasing the terrain where his men of the Pennsylvania Reserves had fought in defense of the Round Top. He held and preserved that ground until it could become a part of the magnificent park that developed adjacent to the original national cemetery.

It was a Pennsylvania outfit, incidentally, the 56th Infantry Regiment, that fired the first volley against Robert E. Lee’s invaders from the South in the opening engagement of the battle, July 1, 1863. So extensive was the aftermath over the next three days that Union men later retrieved nearly twenty-five thousand firearms left on the battleground, plus more than ten thousand abandoned bayonets and 350 sabers.

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