One hundred and fifty years ago this past week a battle was fought in the Pennsylvania market town of Gettysburg that would become a seminal event within the seminal event of the 19th century – the American Civil War.

The battle was fought on July 1, 2, and 3 when elements of the Confederate and Union armies collided near the village as they were actively looking for each other. Lee had taken his army north for the second time because he couldn’t supply an army confined in a static defensive mode in Northern Virginia. Although his first foray into the north had led to a disastrous battle near Antietam Creek that cost Lee a quarter of his army, he hoped to smash the Union Army on this try. Lincoln, pressed hard by a growing number who were growing tired of the war’s toll, would have to sue for peace if Lee succeeded.

I’ve blogged about the Gettysburg battle in a previous post, most particularly the fighting on July 3, 1863 whose highlight was the infamous “Pickett’s Charge.” The details of the three-day battle are in that blog for all who care to read it.

For all its violence, something about this battle, among all others fought during the war, is mesmerizing. I have been everywhere on the Gettysburg battlefield many times – first as a child with my parents and several times afterward during my college years. As an infant I was scheduled to ride with my great-great-grandfather at Gettysburg in the last reunion of Civil War vets, although he had fought exclusively with General Forrest in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama and was never under Lee’s command. But “Grandpa” Doggett fell ill, missed the reunion, and died the following year.

Twenty-five years have now passed since my last visit when my wife and I spent a full day on the battlefield during the week before the 125th anniversary of the battle. We practically had the park to ourselves as if it had been reserved for a private showing. I “rented” one of the battlefield historians to join us in our car for a tour of the park because I wanted someone with me who knew more than I about what had happened there during those three awful days in July 125 years previously.

The contemporaries of the battle did not intend its story to be lost to the ages. A third of all photographs taken during the war were taken at Gettysburg. Fourteen hundred monuments dot the battlefield landscape to mark where Victorian era men struggled with a bravery that was characteristic of their time to accomplish a purpose that none really understood. History has been kind to some and harsh to others who fought there. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Professor of Rhetoric and Languages and classmate of Harriett Beecher Stowe, is among those favorably treated by history. With no military training, he commanded the 20th Maine Regiment at Gettysburg and is credited with holding his position on Little Round Top against the fearsome Oates Alabama Regiment. For this feat he was awarded one of the 62 Medals of Honor – a recognition initially created for Gettysburg heroes. Chamberlain would rise from Lt. Colonel to General by war’s end and later become governor of Maine, helped in no small measure by his considerable self-promotion.

One treated harshly by history is Confederate General James Longstreet, who must be counted among the few truly intuitive commanders on either side of the war. Longstreet’s instinct for a battlefield equaled if not exceeded Lee’s, and he and Stonewall Jackson were considered Lee’s ablest lieutenants. Longstreet, however, made the “mistake” of telling Lee that the Union fortress at Gettysburg was unassailable and counseled his commander to move the Confederate Army eastward to get between Washington City and the Meade’s forces. That would compel Meade to abandon the hill fortifications and give Lee the defensive battle he originally sought. Instead, Lee’s answer was Pickett’s disastrous assault against the middle of the Union line, costing Pickett 7,500 men – half of his assault force.

Longstreet was born on a cotton plantation near modern-day Gainesville, Georgia, 40 miles north of Atlanta, although it was then part of South Carolina. He was not, therefore, part of the Virginia aristocracy that peppered the command ranks of the Confederate Army. Joining the Republican Party and serving in the Grant administration after the war contributed to his fall from grace among history’s “Lost Cause” revisionists (mostly Virginians) who charged him with culpable disobedience at Gettysburg and a main factor in the South’s loss of the war.

The Battle of Gettysburg has been labeled the turning point of the war. It was not. Vicksburg fell the day after the battle at Gettysburg ended, giving a rising reputation to its Union victor, General U.S. Grant. Grant would ultimately be called east to face Lee, replacing Meade and solving once and for all Lincoln’s search for a general who would fight.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, who at one time had been Grant’s superior and became his chief lieutenant in the Vicksburg campaign, would take over the Union command in Tennessee where he faced General Braxton Bragg, one of the most incompetent Confederate commanders in the war. In the aftermath of the Confederate victory at Chickamauga, General Nathan Bedford Forrest became so infuriated with Bragg – his boss – and the failure to follow up the enemy escaping toward Chattanooga that he threatened Bragg with death if he ever crossed Forrest’s path again. Jefferson Davis wisely sent Forrest as far away from Chattanooga as possible, where Forrest gave the Union Army as much grief as possible in Mississippi until the end of the war.

The Vicksburg victory released Grant to fight Lee and released Sherman against Bragg, which ultimately led to the fall of Chattanooga, Atlanta, and the March to the Sea – the “war is hell” scorched earth campaign that collapsed resistance in the Deep South. So we see Vicksburg as pivotal as Gettysburg in determining the South’s fate in the war.

It’s true that Lee’s loss of a third of his fighting force in Gettysburg forced him back to Virginia where a shortage of men and supplies would never again allow more aggressive campaigning than defense. But Lee gave as good as he got for the next 22 months in the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor until he was finally cornered near Appomattox, Virginia in April 1865.

One thing leads to another in life and war, filling both with “what ifs” and “if onlys.” Gettysburg was “a” turning point but not “the” turning point of the war. If the Greeks had lost the battles of Marathon or Salamis to the Persians five centuries before the birth of Christ, the west would be speaking Farsi today instead of their native western languages. If the US Navy had lost the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Americans would likely be speaking Japanese today. It’s unlikely that the US Navy and Marines could have won the decisive Guadalcanal Campaign and their first offensive battle, which started the march toward the Japanese home islands and victory.

The combined Gettysburg losses in killed, wounded, and missing for both sides were about 50,000. Civilians were left to care for the wounded and dying and clean up the carnage left behind. Some wrote a record of what they saw:

… And then, these scenes themselves, who can adequately describe them? Houses demolished, fences destroyed, tall forest trees mowed down like so many stalks of hemp; artillery wagons crushed, broken muskets scattered in every direction, unused cartridges in immense numbers, balls of all kinds, ramrods and bayonets, bits of clothing, belts, gloves, knapsacks, letters in great quantities all lying promiscuously on the field; dead horses in great numbers, some torn almost asunder by cannon balls, some pierced in the side by grape shot, and others with their legs completely shot away; some noble chargers apparently kneeling in death, their necks, crested with flowing manes, gracefully arched, as if still proud of the riders on their backs.

And then many of the human dead, whose mutilated bodies, still unburied, were lying around in all positions. Some with their hands gently folded over on their breasts, others reclining gracefully on their elbows, and others still leaning against trees, stumps or stones, as if wrapped in the arms of sleep, and given over to sweet dreams.

Although given temporary burial after the battle, a permanent cemetery was conceived and constructed as the final resting place for those who died at Gettysburg. Lincoln was invited to make “appropriate remarks” to dedicate the cemetery, not the battlefield as commonly understood. Lincoln was not the keynote speaker for the dedication service, however. Edward Everett, a noted orator of the day, had been chosen for that task. And orate he did – for two hours, for almost 14,000 words.

When he had finished his speech, the ceremony passed to Lincoln, who in less than three minutes and 280 words delivered what has come to be known as the Gettysburg Address:

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 so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we may take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

To understand what Lincoln really meant that November day in 1863, his words must be studied. They can’t simply be read. I will not parse its phrases. Indeed, Garry Wills has done a wonderful job of that in his 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America.

From the very first paragraph, however, Lincoln performs what Wills calls “one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight of hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.” The concept of the Union of which Lincoln spoke and the one held by the audience was as different as night and day.

If you count back 87 years from 1863, you come to 1776 – the year of the Declaration of Independence. Our fathers did not bring forth a new nation in 1776. They declared independent colonies to be free of British rule – and no more. There was no nation. There were no states. While Rhode Island was the last colony to ratify the Constitution in 1790 and the Bill of Rights was ratified the next year, did a new nation exist at that point? Of course not. As I’ve said many times, the Founders were deeply suspicious of a central government and for a long time refused to support it financially. A representative to the Constitutional Convention or the colonial ratification conventions thought of himself as a Virginia man or a New Hampshire man. No one thought of themselves as an American. Their new Constitution “united” the states in name only.

That the American Civil War was fought to abolish slavery is part of the mythology fobbed today as historical fact. At its core, the war was a clash of two economic systems, one a people-intensive agrarian society and the other a capital-intensive industrial society. There were slaveholders on both sides of this conflict. Four Northern states that didn’t secede from the Union were slave states. Many in the Union officer corps owned slaves or were sympathetic to its institution.

Lincoln’s views on slavery were themselves ambiguous. In 1858 he said, “I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social, and political evil … and look hopefully to the time when as a wrong it may come to an end.” Yet the next year he told a Cincinnati audience, “I now assure you, that I neither … had, nor have, nor ever had, any purpose in any way of interfering with the institution … [of slavery].” Once the war was underway, he told newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” His Emancipation Proclamation was not universal. It was directed only to the slaves in the states in rebellion.

And there you have it. The subtext of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address was his concept of what union meant. Slavery was not mentioned or inferred. Lincoln believed the United States was an indivisible union that could not be broken by secession. In contrast few, if any, of people in the North or South held that view in 1860. Their views had changed little from those of the Founders regarding the power of central government and the meaning of union.

At the beginning of the war the federal government was small and marginally significant. Lincoln saw a more powerful role for the federal government. Where Lincoln saw absolute indivisibility, the people saw a loose confederation of states. When Lee was offered command of the Union Army, he refused it. Lee saw himself as a Virginia man. His state came first; the Union second. Longstreet was later impugned by the Virginia revisionists because he was not a Virginia man. State loyalties ran strong in the near-century before the war.

There was no small concern in the debates leading up to the final eruption at Ft. Sumter that the sovereignty of southern states could be threatened by an overreaching central government. If Congress exceeded the powers enumerated to it on the slavery issue, what would prevent Congress or the President from consolidating even more power from the states?

And in fact, with the fall of Ft. Sumter, Lincoln blockaded Southern ports – an act of war taken without congressional consent. Lincoln raised an army for a three-year enlistment when the Constitution says only Congress can raise an army. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, declared martial law, arrested civilians for trial by illegal military tribunals, locked up 13 of Maryland’s legislators without trial to prevent their state’s secession, and essentially used the war as an excuse to consolidate presidential power and expand the influence of the federal government.

When Chief Justice Taney protested that Lincoln was going beyond the Constitution in the exercise of federal power, Lincoln ignored him. The Court has no way to enforce itself, relying on the Executive branch to enforce the Court or abide by its rulings. Nixon almost created a constitutional crisis by ignoring a court order to turn over the White House tapes in the Watergate scandal. He waited six days before he compiled. What if he hadn’t?

We’ve recently seen Proposition 8 – the will of the citizens of California to modify their Constitution through a lawful vote – overturned because their Governor and Attorney General refused to defend it against challenges that ultimately were appealed to the Supreme Court. Both the Governor and Attorney General had sworn to uphold the state’s Constitution of which Proposition 8 was a part. What happens when the political leaders of a state refuse to fulfill their responsibilities?

By ignoring Judge Taney, Lincoln was jeopardizing the balance of powers and the federal systems of checks and balances. That was a dangerous precedent.

The Civil War ended with more power invested in the federal government than ever before in the history of the Republic. Lincoln had said he would relinquish it when the war was ended. He didn’t live long enough at war’s end to prove true to his word, but his successor, Andrew Johnson, disassembled the wartime power structure. The Presidents who followed have reconsolidated it.

Today the American people are as divided as they were on the eve of the Civil War. But instead of a president who was fundamentally a uniter in 1860, we have one in 2008 who is fundamentally a divider. His respect for the Constitution is cavalier and his willful attempts to by-pass Congress in governing is standard operating procedure. The vast regulatory machinery he has created is replacing elective government. A bill no longer must run the political gauntlet to become law. It’s simply created by an unelected bureaucrat in the form of a regulation that becomes as binding as any law.

What has been happening in presidential power over the last 75 years should concern us all. In a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887, Lord Acton expressed a warning about the tendency of power to consolidate – ultimately in the hands of one person. It happened in the Roman republic. It is happening in the American republic.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.