Gettysburg Is Still White America's Greatest Civil War Battle
A new movie is being filmed in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania this weekend about the famous battle. Director Bo Brinkman, who played Confederate Major Walter H. Taylor in Ron Maxwell’s movie Gettysburg, is returning to the historic town for the third time.
In addition to taking part in Maxwell’s movie, Brinkman directed the movie A Gettysburg Christmas (2023)—a story about a young woman whose “Christmas goes sideways when her family shows up uninvited.”
This new endeavor returns Brinkman to the 1863 battle. Gettysburg 1863 “takes place during the Civil War and centers on a local Gettysburg family navigating the chaos of war, the moral crossroads of the Underground Railroad, and the struggles of a Union soldier torn between duty and compassion.”
Count me as overly optimistic, but I have little doubt that this family will emerge relatively unscathed from the horrors of war and that any moral quandaries they experience over slavery and fugitive slaves will be resolved. I don’t even need to see this movie to know how it will play out.
Of course, the family is white. Don’t get me wrong, Brinkman has the right to tell whatever story his heart desires, but imagine for a moment if the story of a family caught in the middle of this campaign and battle were told from the African American perspective.
You could tell it from the perspective of real families like the Brians or Warfields, who actually lived on the battlefield. The story would have plenty of drama, including the kidnapping of hundreds of innocent civilians, whose only crime was the color of their skin as well as the forced displacement of Black families from south central Pennsylvania as Lee’s army entered the state.
We now have a good deal of scholarship on this subject and I hope to add to it in the next few years, but this is still decidedly not the story that much of America wants to learn about when they visit this historic town. Gettysburg is still white America’s greatest Civil War battle.
Gettysburg remains a battle fought by white men.
It’s a battle that white Americans have returned to more than once to commemorate.
It’s a battle that white Americans have used to exclude and terrorize others.
It’s a battle that white Americans still love to walk over and remember.
It’s a battle, where every November a local Black professor of history has to remind the public that these guys fought for slavery.
In 2015, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates published Between the World and Me. While the book is a memoir, it is written as a series of letters to his then teenaged son. At one point Coates recalls a family trip that included stops at Civil War battlefields:
I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only ten years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was….
Do you remember standing with me and your mother, during one of our visits to Gettysburg, outside the home of Abraham Brian? We were with a young man who’d educated himself on the history of black people in Gettysburg. He explained that Brian Farm was the far end of the line that was charged by George Pickett on the final day of Gettysburg. He told us that Brian was a black man, that Gettysburg was home to a free black community, that Brian and his family fled their home for fear of losing their bodies to the advancing army of enslavement, led by the honored and holy Confederate general Robert E. Lee, whose army was then stealing black people from themselves and selling them south. George Pickett and his troops were repulsed by the Union Army. Standing there, a century and a half later, I though of one of Faulkner’s characters famously recalling how this failure tantalized the minds of all “Southern” boys–“It’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun….” All Faulkner’s Southern boys were white. But I, standing on the farm of a black man who fled with his family to stay free of the South, saw Pickett’s soldiers charging through history, in wild pursuit of their strange birthright–the right to beat, rape, rob, and pillage the black body. That is all of what was “in the balance,” the nostalgic moment’s corrupt and unspeakable core.
Perhaps one day Gettysburg will catch up.
One day, Gettysburg *will* catch up. I hope we're both alive when that day arrives. 🙏🏽
As always, thoughtful and balanced.