Sadness On The Land

Back to Gettysburg. The news of recent days distracted me. Finally, I decided that it seemed appropriate to return to a previous crisis in which 85,000 men fought to save the Union and dissolve slavery and 75,000 men fought to save slavery and dissolve the Union. It started when elements of Heth’s Division stumbled into Union Forces north of the city of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and ended when Robert E. Lee withdrew his defeated army and retreated to Virginia. More than 7,000 soldiers and one civilian, a woman named Jennie Wade would lie dead. The Union would survive and the bigotry and inhumanity that ignited would end.

They thought. We thought.

I once worked with a great-grandson of Thomas G. Clark who marched into Gettysburg on July 1, 1863 with his two sons Jonathan and Albert as members of the 42^nd Mississippi Regiment under BG Joe Davis, a nephew of Jefferson. He shared transcripts of letters now in the Confederate Museum at Oxford, TN.  Captain Clark had written to his wife on June 13^th: “Try to keep in good spirits for I intent to come home this summer or fall to stay for I think that the Boys have had experience enough now to git along without me and it is my duty to pay some attention to my family at home and in fact I think that I am gitting to old and have become unhealthy and I think that in justice to myself and family at home it it is my duty to quit this army at least for a while.” [Grammar transcribed as written.]

Thomas and his son Jonathon would die on July 1, when General Heth’s division ran into that of General Buford. Many of Davis's men would die in an abandoned railroad cut when he lost control of the division after an initial victory. It's likely this included the father and son. No one knows where they are buried.

Albert would die on July 3 as part of the left flank making the assault on Cemetery Ridge. A few of the men in that sad and battered regiment would make it to Emmetsburg Road and maybe 50 would cross it. The Virginian descendants of the Pickett’s fresh division would cruelly blame those on the far left for the failure of the insanely ordered assault. History can be as deceitful as the present.

A granddaughter would later write of the widow and mother of the Clark men: “When the news of this awful disaster reached home, Grandmother Clark prayed and shouted all night, and she often told us in speaking of those days that we didn’t know what sorrow was.”

Renown author Zora Neale Hurston would have one of her characters in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” express the war differently: “But it was a long time after dat befo’ de Big Surrender at Richmond. Den de big bell ring in Atlanta and all de men in gray uniforms had to go to Moultrie, and bury their swords in the ground to show they was never to fight about slavery no mo’. So den we knowed we was free.”

Free? As we have found over the last days, not quite yet.

Day One: The Railroad Cut