The battle at Gettysburg on the first three days of July 1863 was immediately understood to be a turning point of the war; the generals had needed and gone in search of a Gettysburg even before they knew its name, and afterward the Union had needed to secure its meaning in name.² But like any such defining event, even now it actively renews its call to be understood. Lincoln’s famous effort to universalize its meaning fulfilled an exigency, but his words became so large in U.S. history that they became an event in itself, belying his assessment that the “world will little note.” Violence does not always call for interpretation with an insistence proportionate to its cost in lives and suffering, but rather to the desires and interests of the living whose narratives it inhabits. However, there is something that patiently survives the appropriation of violence by others, since its personal meaning attaches directly in proportion to its material particularity as one of the few experiences both inescapably personal and universal.

The particularity of flesh and its experience is magnified by violence, suffering, and death, drawing appropriative acts back within its orbit, just as the interpretive projects of Gettysburg weave themselves out of this first significance. Trauma places Lincoln’s memorial in play. Because so many people died on that field in those three days, Lincoln’s humility was appropriate; and the event reasserts itself in relation to any interpretation. We have here the counterposing pattern that will emerge at several points in this study, that event and interpretation exist only in their reciprocity.³ The materiality of the event pulls insistently toward its particularity, the need to come to terms pulls the event toward generality. In his text Lincoln draws attention to the relation between the most concrete, primal experience of the flesh (its life or death) on a ground that still bore the literal stain of that experience when he spoke, and he becomes, in the service of a cause, a midwife of its meaning. What he does principally is to traverse the space between its particularity and its universality. In the consequence the effect of his words, the history of the country, and the commodification of Gettysburg have drastically recalibrated this relation. And so it goes. What I want to do in this reflection is to think about the materiality of Gettysburg, and how it resists or yields to its interpretive history.

The village land was literally defiled by the battle, and became what a resident called a “blighted land,” a “city of the dead”:⁶ “Thousands of fermenting bodies, with gas-distended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat…. A nurse shuddered at the all-too-visible ‘rise and swell of human bodies’ … the whole area of Gettysburg—a town of only 2,500 inhabitants—was one makeshift burial ground, fetid and steaming.”⁷ David Wills, a Gettysburg attorney, reported to the governor of the state “several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them.”⁸ One can only imagine how the scene must have appeared to the survivors as they emerged after the battle from their hiding places: “A herculean task fell on the people now staring in shock at the shambles around them. Most were women and old men.”⁹ For many days after the retreat, wounded soldiers lay bleeding and groaning on the field. As a reporter wrote: “There are literally acres covered with them.”¹⁰ The logistics of caring for the wounded were monumental. In the wake of this effort, the governor appointed Wills to supervise the final cleanup. The attorney opened up contract bids for the reburials and took title to a formal cemetery plot. It was a gruesome task, and Wills “felt the need for artful words to sweeten the poisoned air of Gettysburg.”¹¹

But this immediate work was quickly superseded by the broader strategic meaning of the event. It was for this larger aim that the havoc and tragedy had to be turned to account.¹² Lincoln did this by asking his audience to take up and extend the dedication of the soldiers. The sacrifice embodied in this field is, he said, the benchmark by which to mea sure his listeners’ own actions, and by so doing they could bind themselves to that sacrifice in one purpose. This was a severe test for the value of an ideal. Four months after the battle, standing puddles still remained and required a public works project to correct.¹³ The universal and the particular. Ideas and ideals must bring themselves into true with their material cost; this needs to be and is a constant negotiation.

Physically the battlefield was approximately ten square miles of rolling orchards, next to a small market town that served as the county seat of Adams County eight miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It is a crossing point for a dozen roads that extend in every direction. Lee launched an incursion north to take the initiative, draw enemy troops away from Southern targets, and secure provisions for the war effort.¹⁴ Southeastern Pennsylvania was in purely spatial terms a high-value target, with frightening proximity to Washington and Baltimore. Moreover two abandoned harvest seasons had left Southern agriculture exhausted, and the unguarded Pennsylvania countryside proved a tempting lure.¹⁵

Lee had ordered maps of eastern Pennsylvania to plan and execute his attack and had begun the campaign with only a general idea of his theater of battle. An accidental skirmish set off a chain reaction that drew the troops to this particular place, and the sides rushed to the opportunity.¹⁶ As a staging ground for war, its three-day battle, the largest ever fought in the Western Hemisphere, incurred some fifty thousand casualties, ten times the number of Americans killed and wounded on D-day.¹⁷

Before trench warfare, commanding the high ground on the field of battle normally gave position to one side, and it was the Union that commanded the high ground at Gettysburg. War at that time consisted of a massing of troops, discharge of artillery, close combat of foot soldiers and cavalry, the taking of positions, the breaking of lines, the skill or daring of maneuvers, the will to stand or the loss of will in rout or retreat. Ultimately the Northern troops held their ground, inflicted the worst casualties, beat back the advance, and forced a retreat. It was all there in a field; a theater of war, a play of chance, strategies, mistakes, vanity, loyalty, brutality, courage, cowardice, butchery.

Carnage was, in the logic of war, strategic. Whoever could withstand, stomach, endure, and ignore depredation and harm to continue advancing in order to win would break the will of the other. Life and land are the target; that I will take what is yours, and that you will not take what is mine. An innovation of this time, “total war,” was the logical fulfillment of this strategy. The fierceness of the Southern will to prevail had to be met with a demonstration of finality, no longer a symbolic instruction but the utter destruction of land, property, and person.

The logic of war binds its horror and transcendence to each other. Gettysburg became, of necessity, a ground for the evocation of the highest ideals, a theater of war, a theater of the imagination. Lincoln called on the landscape architect of the Gettysburg cemetery as he was preparing his speech to learn more about the topography of the land that he had only known from his battle reports.¹⁸ He understood that he was transmuting a place into an idea, and that the abstraction was an exigency for the soaked ground that was a still-open wound of the traumatized community. We call upon the earth itself to aid in this process. In the dedicatory moment, the land absorbs human feeling. At times of heightened emotion in the presence of the dead, grief gains a preternatural seeing, the earth takes on deeper colorations and responds by sharing its burden. The act of cleansing, transmutation, translation, the history so laden with ideology seeks some ground.

But on the other hand, the inscrutable symbol of such places becomes muted with time. There is something incongruous about the layers of interpretation, memorial committees, interests groups, tourist concerns that Gettysburg attracts. The commodification of the site began almost immediately. Five months after the battle, an advertisement appeared in a Gettysburg news paper: “Battle-Field Views. A full set of our Photographic Views of the Battle-field of Gettysburg, form a splendid gift for the Holidays. The finest yet published can be seen at the Excelsior Gallery.”¹⁹ Not just commodified, but distanced from the loss, so that the exchange of horror and honor is an easier transaction. A lovely, antiseptic landscape, ready again for war.

The physical battleground at Gettysburg was visited first in an act of dedication (Lincoln) and then in the enduring act of return. In this way the importance of that battle in defining a nation secures its perpetuity. The confluence of topography and iconography in the Gettysburg memorial project turns history into allegory. The landscape is dotted with more than 1,400 “interpretive markers” locating critical battle moments, changes of momentum, an unfolding three-day drama expressed in a tableau (McPherson, Hallowed Ground, 66, 79). In recent times a controversy has ensued around the placement of the high-water mark of Confederate attack. History had awarded this honor to Armistead’s famous breach of the stone wall on Cemetery Hill, but North Carolinians claimed that their Twenty-sixth Regiment had pushed twenty yards farther.²⁰ The land’s particularity is not lost on the visitor. That much at least is not lost. Like a text, the land has a certain fixity. On the other hand, its meaning does not remain the same. “It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all” (Gadamer, TM, 297).

Gettysburg was a confluence of so many intersecting strategic, geographic, cultural, political, temporal lines of history and imagination, a crossroads of warring ambitions, a tipping point of battles, a symbolic marker for the birth and rebirth of a nation. Lincoln saw it against the background of modern Western European history, of the failure of European nations to institute a democratic form of government that would realize the Enlightenment ideals of equity and freedom.²¹ It was as if old Europe, weighed down by its own traditions, saw this idea but could not implement it; that it required a fresh start, a blank slate, to have a chance to take root; that the American Revolution was that prodigious first effort at implementation, the placement of a theory in a practice; and that Lincoln’s moment of the Civil War was the actual test of its possibility, when the same old conflicts of interest that ensnared Europe were in effect recapitulated internally, when the forces for self-determination and mutual cooperation clashed.²² The original experiment had consciously set about navigating between twin dangers, on the one side a baronial landed gentry of sectarian factions, and on the other side an absolutist, autocratic central power that perverted the power of the mass to its own ends. It needed union in order to protect itself against its recent masters, and it could not do this if it were a weak, fragmented confederation vulnerable to the ambitions of great foreign powers. Lincoln knew well Daniel Webster’s famous argument of 1830, which represented a key moment in this national conversation.²³ On the floor of the Senate, Webster sought to place the nation’s balance of powers in its historical context in the work of the Founders:

Lincoln universalized Gettysburg by exploding place as metonymy to the scale of history. The metonymy telescopes outward in the following hierarchy: “portion of that field,” “battle-field,” “nation,” “any nation.” The temporal hierarchy has a similar expansion: the moment of dedication is n...