Napoleon’s last battle in Waterloo, Belgium, changed the landscape and the course of history for Europe in June of 1815. Comparatively, during the American Civil War, in July of 1863, a three day battle in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is remembered as one of the most decisive events in United States history; an event that changed the course of American life.
Both battles were defining moments in our world history!
I spent five years living in Waterloo, Belgium, just a stone’s throw away from the battlefield. When I moved to the United States over two years ago, I had already decided that I must visit the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. So I recently drove out to Gettysburg! Every year Gettysburg is visited by more than 1,000,000 visitors.
It was with mixed emotions that I toured the battlefield, which spans 17,000 acres. On these fields, 165,000 soldiers fought for what they believed. One can almost hear the horses, see the cannonballs flying, smell the gunpowder, see men dying in hordes, and imagine the pain and fear in soldiers and civilians in Gettysburg. More than 53,000 soldiers were killed during the three day battle. There was one civilian casualty, a young woman named Jenny Wade, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, killed by a stray bullet in her sister’s kitchen. Aside from the human wreckage of battle, almost 5,000 horses and mules were lost. When walking in the streets of Gettysburg, I passed many houses that still remain from this period, some of them with massive bullet holes from soldiers’ rifles. There is the famous Trostle Barn, located in the middle of the battlefield that was surrounded by heavy fighting on July 2nd. And still visible today is a hole from a cannonball that blew through the building. Incredible! The battle is still palpable in Gettysburg!
On July 3, 1863, the third day of battle, the Confederate forces put forth all they had when approximately 15,000 men, in a formed line, marched onto an open field toward the Union positions and met their death during the famous infantry assault called Pickett’s Charge. It is estimated that two out of three Confederate soldiers died during the assault that day, ending the three day battle of Gettysburg.
The war raged on for two more bloody years, but the Confederacy never recovered from their loss at Gettysburg. I suppose that the Union Army was fighting for the right cause with will power that can move mountains!
War is tragic, but a civil war is more so because the fight is among fellow countrymen, brothers fighting their brothers. The American Civil War that began in 1861 and lasted four years claimed more than 620,000 American lives. A terrible tragedy!
As President Lincoln said in his famous Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation conceived and so dedicated, can long endure"
Today we have a United States of America because the Union was saved as a result of victory in Gettysburg and the American Civil War. With a different outcome, we might know a different America, a severed nation built on different values.
As someone told me in Gettysburg - President Washington founded the USA, but President Abraham Lincoln shaped it!
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