Gettysburg | Civil War Historian Gives Guided Tour

that guy takes over abner doubleday okay he's not thinking about baseball or publishing today or anything like that abner doubleday came onto this battlefield with a few thousand troops under his command all of a sudden reynolds is dead he didn't know what reynolds wanted to do and there's the chaos of the civil war hey everybody i'm gary edelman with the american battlefield trust and i'm also a licensed battlefield guide at gettysburg here at the gettysburg national military park more than 8 000 acres this place is huge the battle swayed here over three days there's a national cemetery here that abraham lincoln's specially made famous and we are going to go around you're going to join us in the car and on the battlefield of a tour of this massive and important american battlefield now we hope that you'll watch this video and actually go to gettysburg to see the authenticity of the real thing and when you do go we hope you'll hire a licensed battlefield guide this video shouldn't replace your experience rather hire a guide who can answer your questions who can tailor the tour toward where you're from and what you're interested in you can book these guides through the gettysburg foundation or just go to the gettysburg national military park museum and visitor center walk up to the desk and they will match you with a licensed guide if one is available so um before you can come we hope you enjoy this video come on with us as we tour the battlefield all right so we are starting out here at the gettysburg national military park we're at the museum and visitor center and we're going to make our way out to the battlefield and what we're going to do is start with the most basic things of all um the civil war was fought in the 19th century 1861 to 1865 and gettysburg's right in the middle okay now just like gettysburg is in the uh middle of the civil war we're right in the middle of the gettysburg battlefield we're on a place or below a place called cemetery hill i'll be referring to that a lot throughout the day and here's what you really have to know this is a huge battlefield it's 25 square miles we are not going to see the whole thing in two or three hours um but we will check out all the major bits and pieces getting out a few times uh we're going to drive more than 20 miles as we go around and here's what you got to remember okay this battle was fought july 1st 2nd and 3rd 1863 on some of the hottest days of the summer july 1st was a huge confederate or rebel or southern or gray coat victory okay july 2nd was kind of a tie and july 3 was a huge yankee or northern or union or federal victory culminating the victory for the north um right in the middle of the civil war in a in an attack we now call pickett's charge okay so we're going to go out on the battlefield and check out these days somewhat in order okay and i'll do my best to answer some questions and describe things as we go along we'll talk about people we'll talk about how to shoot cannons we'll talk about why civil war soldiers apparently fought in a stupid manner you can't help but think that if you ever see a civil war movie and if people really have ever seen a civil war movie it's either the movie glory or maybe it's the movie gettysburg it's based on the killer angels um and uh a pulitzer prize winning book now we are turning on to the tawny town road you might be able to see some of the battlefield off to the left there and um you know we're on the reverse slope of a place called cemetery ridge cemetery ridge is called that because the hill we're climbing up here is cemetery hill it's all connected cemetery hill is not named for the huge soldiers national cemetery that is here dedicated by abraham lincoln but rather it's named for the local town cemetery that you might catch a view of off to the right there that was here before the battle later four months afterward you're now catching a view off to the front right of the soldiers national cemetery where thousands of people are buried specifically 3 500 plus northern soldiers who died on this northern battlefield okay they did not bury union and confederate north and south soldiers together on purpose during the civil war they were still fighting okay so this is a northern cemetery here containing mostly union dead about nine 979 are completely unidentified but we have some idea of who all the rest are okay now the southern dead remained in the ground for about eight years until they were removed south by a southern ladies group um remember this is eight years later there's no dog tags in the civil war so most of those southern soldiers are being sensed out their remains as unidentified piles of bones but because they waited so long because there were simply so many bodies we estimate there's still hundreds of remains around the gettysburg battlefield there is no active um you know effort to try to locate them at this point what better place for them than the hallowed ground of the gettysburg national military park now we are going in north toward the first days field but first we're going to pass through the town of gettysburg and the most important thing about gettysburg the reason the battle was fought here is because of the roads if you look at it from above it looks like a wagon wheel with spokes going out those are the ten roads that led into gettysburg and here we are passing two of them the tawny town road and um the emmitsburg road the roads are generally named for the places they ultimately go okay and that is why the battle is fought here it is difficult to pass through this part of pennsylvania without coming through gettysburg and the rhodes drew the armies here now this is a town of about 2 400 people um and there are about 28 000 wounded soldiers left here after the battle and the town has to clean that up remember 12 roughly on average desperately wounded soldiers we're not talking about kids with colds here either we're talking about wounded soldiers whose legs to be need to be amputated and what not who are bleeding out for every civilian that's in the town for every man woman and child and this is the southern edge of town and i thought i'd point out that silver building over there because you can still see bullet holes in the side of it there were southerners in that house and union soldiers behind us on cemetery hill were trying to dislodge those confederates um who were positioned there now most of the houses that were here at the time uh there's more than 200 of them standing don't have bullet holes in them so i'll encourage you all to look at buildings such as three of the ones at this intersection that actually have little plaques on them that say civil war building july of 1863 right on the corners of the building and you could become experts in your own right as to which houses were here which buildings were here and which ones were not now if we use our imagination here get rid of the cars and these types of roads and everything like that all the electrical poles we can maybe put ourselves back in the spring of 1863 and in that spring the confederate commander a guy named general robert e lee you've heard of him had won a huge victory at a place you may have heard of called chancellorsville way back down in virginia okay now after chancellorsville lee and his troops are feeling good and lee decides to invade the north and in invading the north lee wants to threaten northern cities like harrisburg and baltimore and washington okay he wants to collect supplies up here in the abundant pennsylvania farmland and take the war away from virginia which had been supplying the armies for two years already but mainly lee wants to win a major battle up here on northern soil okay strengthen the peace movement in the north the yankees you don't want to fight anymore do you by and winning that major victory and strengthen that peace movement and as a result have the union give up on the chance for war and win the civil war essentially and the south can go its own way okay it's not going to work that way exactly although robert e lee takes his 75 000 soldiers called the army of northern virginia he marches them up into the north very quickly before the union army can even get started they're still way back down in virginia somewhere okay lee takes his men up into pennsylvania and he spreads them out okay 40 miles east of here past york pennsylvania 40 miles north of here almost to harrisburg pennsylvania and more than 40 miles west of here to chambersburg pennsylvania and beyond so you've got southerners spread out all over this part of the state creating quite a havoc up here and collecting critical supplies for their army now the union army's under a new commander who you may or may not have heard of his name is george gordon mead george gordon mead was commanding about ten thousand soldiers about four days before the battle and then one more day goes on and he is given command of just about the largest army in the world three days before the biggest battle ever fought in american history now we've all had tough jobs in our lives but just imagine something like that wrap your brain around that you're talking about some limited on-the-job training which affects some little bits of the army but suddenly he's in command of everything and the whole future of the american democracy according to some is riding upon how he does okay now mead is sorry to spoil the end he's going to do pretty well here okay he marches his men continues marching them up pretty quickly okay and here's the important part this is what you really have to remember when lee hears that mead is coming lee decides to concentrate his army from the east and the north and the west okay and when he concentrates from those three places i wonder where the roads are gonna bring them right here to gettysburg that's why the battle is fought here i can't stress it enough you might see a movie or read a book that says this battle started over shoes or there's some big rumored uh you know cache of shoes here it's totally myth there is no shoe factory in gettysburg there's nothing beyond shoe stores at the time it's the roads that brought people here and it sets up a pretty weird circumstance actually it's one of the few battles where the southern army is army is coming generally from the north and the northern army is coming generally from the south okay they're going to bump into each other here in and around gettysburg and it will result in the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere according to many so what we're going to do now is turn on to a different road here we're leaving the tawny town road and we're turning onto the chambersburg pike aha i've called the emmitsburg road in the tonytown road roads but this is a pike that means it might be improved in some fashion this one might have a little bit of wood going across it it's not just a straight up dirt road okay so there are a few pikes coming into gettysburg namely the best one of all the baltimore pike made of crushed white limestone this is by no means the type of road we would like to drive our cars on now here on the chambersburg pike but it was one of the nicer roads and it will be the main artery where the union and confederate soldiers will first run into each other on july 1 1863. here we are we continue to head west and you're going to see one of the first of several ridges west of gettysburg this on your front left is seminary ridge it's called seminary ridge because the lutheran theological seminary was located during the here during the battle some of the original buildings are still here in fact gettysburg is an up and coming town it's got two educational institutions of higher learning the seminary and gettysburg college then known as pennsylvania college it's got several banks several churches and everything like that so um it's an up and coming place the railroad had just come to town okay so we've now crested seminary ridge and you're now starting to see the first day's battlefield okay and we are basically north and west of gettysburg now and this is what the battlefield looked like at the time sure you see some stop lights and some monuments that weren't here but other than that if you see a fence that's probably the type of fence that was right there at the time of the battle on the left i see a post and rail fence and on the right you might be able to catch a virginia worm fence for the way it worms its way through the countryside this is what the gettysburg national military park is trying to do to get this place to look like it did so that we can see what the soldiers saw and understand this historic event as well as we could now on the morning of july 1st 1863 a couple of miles ahead of me a cavalry scout cavalrymen of the guys who go out on horseback in front of the army to look for the enemy um fire the first shot of the battle of gettysburg doesn't hurt that he was from my home state of illinois okay and he is going to run back to tell his boss a guy named john buford you might remember him from the gettysburg movie um who then sets up his cavalrymen on these ridges west of town this is macpherson's ridge named for the mcpherson barn which you may have seen on the left just a little bit ago and all of the farms at gettysburg retain the names of the people who lived here in july of 1863. now beaufort is going to try to hold off on this ridge for a while but facing him is the confederate infantry they're the foot soldiers they had to march up here from virginia and they walked up here but ultimately you know you need foot soldiers to fight foot soldiers beaufort will fall back as union infantry now arrives so now you've got union infantry pouring into these woods in front of me and behind the road behind me and you've got confederates coming here and they're going to bump into each other just like this okay two union brigades against two confederate brigades it's a pretty even fight at first okay let me pause for a second to say a few things while we're here because we can see all sorts of things around me and you've already noticed that we've passed by a lot of monuments i haven't said a thing about them that is because we have more monuments markers and tablets here than anywhere in the world there are more than fourteen hundred monuments markers and tablets and they usually describe what happened at that place okay it's different than cities and other things like that where monuments might be specifically to honor somebody let's look at this one there's a lot of different kinds this one is to a guy named john burns john burns lived here he's almost 70 years old at the time of the battle and um he got sick and tired of hearing this fighting going on right near his house right so he grabs his old war of 1812 musket he claims to be a veteran of the war of 1812 and he enlists with some pennsylvania men fighting along this ridge and they laugh at him you know get out of here old man you know you might get hurt because you know he's almost 70 and 70 is pretty old back then especially for anyone watching you know i'm not saying 70 is old today or anything like that but you know they kept on laughing at him until he went inside this wood line right over here fought alongside some wisconsin soldiers fought quite respectably got wounded three times and then captured by the southerners okay now he threw his gun away and he buried his ammunition and said well i'm just an old man i got caught in the crossfire i lost my cow i don't know what's going on here and the confederates whether they believed him or not didn't see him as a threat they let him go and he crawled back to town recovered and he went on to become the hero of gettysburg the only man to come out specifically civilian to defend the town he became so famous that he made the cover of harper's weekly there is no equivalent for that anymore and um he became so famous that abraham lincoln heard of him in washington and wanted to meet him and did when he came to deliver the gettysburg address now as we enter these woods you'll see by far the most common type of monument and you can see a couple in front of us right here and these are monuments to union regiments such as the 2nd and seventh wisconsin which is some of these first ones that you'll see here when you hear me say the word regiment or see a regimental monument like this one up here on the left um you know think of about 300 soldiers from the same town or county or state or part of a state okay so if a regiment got in a really tight spot it could be that all the young men from one town or county are are wiped out or sick or wounded or something like that now when you see a regional monument i'll encourage you also to look over next to that monument and you see these little markers sticking up out of the ground those are called flank markers okay the end to your line is called your flank and by the way if somebody arrives on the end of your line it's called being flanked okay these soldiers wanted us to know and they did this for us not just roughly where they were but where their right flank was the right side of their line and where their left was okay they did this for us for future generations to know what happened here on this important battlefield okay now if you take about four or five regiments together that's a brigade and that's with these plaques such as this one on the left and you see one in front of you here represent so think of about 1500 soldiers every time you see one of those and by the way a few brigades makes a division a few divisions make a core a few core make an army okay so remember army corps division brigade regiment now here's something you don't see too much on the right here that is a monument to a southern regiment okay the south was much more concerned with memorializing battlefields in the south where they won okay so the south would memorialize this battlefield differently and we will talk about that when we get over on the confederate line for the second and the third day but here we are we are climbing a ridge here that really doesn't have a name we call it the ripple and imagine we are some victorious confederates pushing up this ridge right here i can almost picture it right now okay and right over as we come up here there's a strong union line up here but already happening before this if you look to your left you might be able to see a small monument just sticking up through the trees over there that is when john fulton reynolds the main union commander on the field he's in command of all the troops up here is posting troops in those woods when a confederate bullet goes in the back of his neck comes out his eye and reynolds is killed right as the fighting begins and when reynolds dies that guy takes over abner doubleday okay he's not thinking about baseball or publishing today or anything like that abner doubleday came onto this battlefield with a few thousand troops under his command all of a sudden reynolds is dead he didn't know what reynolds wanted to do and there's the chaos of the civil war people are always dying so when doubled they took over for reynolds someone had to take over for a double day and someone for him and him and him you have hundreds of people doing new jobs during the battle and there are six overall commanders of the union army on the first day alone again like mead had to take command of this army just three days after i'm sorry fight this battle just three days after taking command you also have hundreds of people doing new jobs that they hadn't done before during the battle okay so wrap your brain around that now up here i'd like to tell kids that this is anti-aircraft fire upright cannon barrels but when you see one of those you'll know it's a general's headquarters so we continue to head north on north reynolds avenue to see more of the first day's battlefield okay and we're kind of going up a rise and there was a rise here but the bridge wasn't here at the time what you're looking at here is a railroad cut there was no railroad out here but they made plans for it they made cuts through these ridges that you can see right and left here there's a railroad cut here and it's a great place for soldiers to go to to escape bullets okay that is until an enemy such as the wisconsin and new yorkers behind me charge right up to this cut and point down their rifles upon you and there will be more than 100 mississippi soldiers captured right here on the morning of july first and in that next railroad cut over maybe more than a thousand union soldiers will be captured this is also the site of the last remains found on the gettysburg battlefield a park ranger i believe from another park was walking near the railroad cut and happened to see a femur sticking out of the ground he told the park service they did archaeology very carefully and located um more than 90 percent of the soldiers skeleton and then they found union items and confederate items in the grave so they didn't know for instance if it was a union soldier with a southern coat or a southern soldier with a union belt they bury the soldier in the national cemetery nonetheless here we are we're driving out to see more of the first days battlefield but to me this right here this is what a civil war battlefield looks like sure sometimes they fought in woods they found on mountains they fought along streams but most civil war battles are fought in open fields just like this one okay and if you've ever seen a civil war movie or read a civil war book you learn that soldiers fought in long lines of battle shoulder to shoulder and nothing could look more stupid to us now we can't help it right they just sat in fields and blazed away at each other okay but there's a little bit more to it okay first of all they were using the most modern military tactics they had available to them okay this is how the the officers were taught in military school to fight in long lines of battle okay and there were recent advancements in weaponry that the tactics hadn't exactly caught up to and the main advancements in weaponry is this in the years and decades before the civil war soldiers fired round bullets out of long muskets okay and if you were lucky after that round sort of bullet or ball musket ball pounded out of the gun maybe it would fly 50 yards accurately okay suddenly they invent the rifle and the rifle came comes into greater use in the civil war and that rifle has grooves inside the inside the barrel that's called rifling and it will make not a round bullet but a bullet like this okay a conical bullet or bullet shaped bullet as we now call it that has grooves inside it that will spin as it leaves the barrel because of the rifling and like a spiraled football this will fly farther and more accurately and suddenly this thing can go three or four hundred yards with some degree of accuracy and what that means is an enemy charging towards you you can get off seven or eight more shots than you otherwise would have aha before the civil war you could get within 80 yards of your enemy sure they can fire some cannonballs at you but can't touch you otherwise and then you could just charge on him and it was hand to hand the invention of this the mini ball and the rifled musket and the proliferation of it throughout the military really changed everything for war okay now this one has three rings in it because it's a union bullet generally they had three but not always confederate bullets tended to have two okay but whatever it is this is soft lead this is more than 57 calibers and whatever it hits it just slaps into and whether it hits you know sort of flesh mud bone or rock it's going to some degree flatten it's even going to sort of change its contours before it even leaves the barrel and it just hits whatever it takes into hits in the leg your leg's probably going to be amputated hit you in the arm bone you don't have an arm anymore okay terrible wounds that also brought infection into your body at that time you could survive 10 of these depending on where they hit or one could very easily kill you depending on where it hit i like to focus people's attention over here because here is a life-size representation of a cavalry soldier he was positioned out here before the infantry fight had started and they wanted you to see be able to see these veterans these pennsylvania veterans why don't you be able to see the special equipment they carried what they look like on horseback the special shorter gun that called a carbine that's easier to load and fire on horseback okay so that's what they wanted us to be left with not only their position but what did a cavalryman actually look like now one more thing i was going to say is um about one of my favorite stories of the civil war possibly untrue or apocryphal but i still like it nonetheless about a soldier who was unfortunately shot through the lungs during the battle but fortunately for him he apparently survived you know it's a survivable wound believe it or not of all the wounds you could get and you know this soldier had always had coughing troubles breathing problems after the war but one time seven years after the battle of gettysburg he said he had a bad coughing fit and coughed up a five by seven inch piece of his uniform that had been driven into his lungs during the battle of gettysburg and um he said his breathing trouble went away he took a picture of the piece of the uniform i've seen it before and there he lived a happy and long life every surgeon i've always ever talked to says that's absolutely impossible in any case here we are at what is called the eternal light peace memorial okay it's dedicated in 1938 more than 200 000 people may have been here at the time um and uh most impressively in addition to franklin d roosevelt giving the address over here you had 1800 union and confederate veterans um here together for the 75th anniversary of the battle of gettysburg 75th anniversary these guys were old their average age was 94. the people who planned the dedication of the event were happy and satisfied that only seven of the veterans died when they came to see the monument that weekend and to come to that reunion it's made of alabama limestone and maine granite to symbolize how the north and the south came together okay this is what you did you came together at that time and that's what they were doing sort of a reconciliation although we know that work is still undone okay and there's an eternal flame on top symbolizing piece of turtle in a nation united and with the exception of the gas crunch when there was a cheesy light bulb up there that bulb that flame has been burning continuously since 1938 now if i can direct your attention off to the right over here a little bit you might be able to catch the macpherson barn nine tenths of a mile away it looks like it's being blocked by some trees right now though there it is okay nine tenths of a mile away so first of all you can see what a mile basically looks like in open terrain the trees right behind the mcpherson barn that's a mile away a cannon can reach that we'll talk about cannons before long okay now as i told you earlier there are union soldiers along near that macpherson bar and on macpherson's ridge and confederates are coming up there and they kind of have an even fight of it that's a simplification okay but all i know is the forces are oriented this way and then 7 000 more confederates arrive on this hill called oak hill okay that's bad news for the union soldiers because now they have an enemy on their front and an enemy on their flank okay again if an enemy arrives on your flank it's called being flanked it's the worst thing that can happen to you because these guys are suddenly facing the wrong way and if the confederates over here on oak hill start shooting this way they can't miss if they don't hit this guy they'll hit this guy or this guy or this guy or that guy and the union soldiers can't really fire back because they're all in the way of each other okay it is simple when you are flanked you either run away or get shot or you try to change position okay and most soldiers chose to change position or run away okay it's you didn't just sit there and get shot okay it didn't make any sense so this is how people tried to win battles and this is what happens on the first day of gettysburg eventually the union army tries to take up a position kind of protecting the roads into gettysburg but the confederates with 28 000 soldiers encircle and out flank the union soldiers that's what happens here the union arrives on oak ridge to try it again against the confederates and more confederates arrive on their flank the union arrives in front of me the confederates get on their flank again and that's the story of the first day wherever the union shows up the confederates show up upon their flank and look here we see more of the first day's battlefield and you can finally see the whole first day from over at those radio towers over there is the confederate line stretching around across this hill and all the way opposite the mcpherson farm and this is the smallest of the three days fighting but it is terribly bloody as the southerners outflank the union over on a hill there called barlow's knoll as they get around the end of the union line near the seminary and the union line will collapse and retreat back through town to cemetery hill where we started the tour and cemetery hill is that largest building to the largest hill to the right of the big red steeple and culps hill is another hill to which they retreat which is visible right to the left of the big red steeple as we cross this blind turn here we are heading along oak ridge we haven't talked much about this but when the southerners got those seven thousand soldiers on oak hill behind me they came across this what lovely field now today only to find it wasn't that beautiful after all because the union had taken position unknowingly along this ridge not right where the road is nor where that stone wall is on the left because that still wall was actually 12 feet further down the slope so they were very well masked and as the north carolinians entered this field they were slaughtered in huge numbers the greatest single loss percentage-wise of any brigade at gettysburg particularly heavy losses there but eventually the confederates would capture this position as they rolled in through town you the american battlefield trust have also been active on this ridge here preserving um this house right over here uh on the right thank you for helping us with that one parcel at a time um the trust is working with our best partners in the world the national park service to try to make these battlefields whole to make them be able to look like they looked at the time of the civil war so again we're doubling back a little bit i see the macpherson barn up to our front right i see oak ridge which becomes seminary ridge off to the left and we're going to continue on over so here's the end of the first day really and again just remember the southerners won they want a huge victory and we'll pick this up soon enough but on the late afternoon of july first 1863 robert e lee's staff rode on ahead of him in the wake of the confederate army and started looking for a suitable place for lee to place his headquarters they decided upon a small house on seminary ridge to the left we'll talk about that when we're able to turn there on the afternoon of the first robert e lee's staff his aides came forward to try to find a suitable place to put his headquarters and they chose here this ridge that the southerners had just fought very hard to get this is seminary ridge and the american battlefield trust has preserved more than 17 acres along this ridge including the site of robert e lee's headquarters you can see it we it was our largest restoration effort we'll show you some pictures along the way of this incredible effort and we really appreciate the support on this now we're going to turn here on to seminary ridge we'll get our first close-up view of the seminary campus like i said there were only three buildings on this ridge during the battle and this is one of them on the left the philip charles henry croft house and all the other ones around you you see weren't really here except there's going to be one on the front left up here this is the edifice of the lutheran theological seminary with its impressive cupola used by both sides during the battle of gettysburg it was also a huge hospital and now houses a very nice seminary ridge museum as well it is still an active seminary and if i didn't mention it already the oldest active lutheran seminary in the country founded in 1826 now here we are on the confederate line this is called west confederate avenue and that's why it's called that there are confederates lined up this whole way we're going to be on this road for about 20 minutes or more okay and as we drive along this road imagine southerners lined up shoulder to shoulder the entire way in two lines called ranks okay sometimes with reinforcements going on okay with all of your ammunition that's your ordinance your commissary that's your food with messengers galloping back and forth in the rear these armies are huge and i have no real way to explain how big they are other than to say if you were to take lee's army the smaller of the two and put it on a road like this and march at four men abreast okay and then with all of its horses and wagons and everything behind it and you put lee lee's army on that road it would stretch from here to washington dc 70 miles okay 70 miles okay it would take you days to get an order from one side of your army to the other if you marched it on one road so why would you okay you could stand and watch troops pass for a whole day and then another day just for the army to go by you so then to try to avoid that they would try to march on parallel roads to get to the same place all without cell phones or walkie-talkies okay just imagine trying to control an army like that trying to feed an army like that and that's the smaller of the two armies now in just a minute or so we're going to get out and see some of the battlefield open up but as we drive along here i'm seeing a lot of cannons off to the left these are confederate cannons or they're representing confederate cannons and they're only representing about half as many as we're actually here at the time okay we're going to talk about artillery when we get out we have lots to talk about when we get out here all right here we go this is our first stop let's walk over this way so look you see a stone wall right over here um these stone walls were here before the battle they were installed you know by the thrifty pennsylvania dutch farmers who had to clear their fields of stone so they mostly encircled their properties with stone walls but the troops were glad to use them this stone wall generally marks the confederate line over here and look at this okay you can see out toward um you know the union uh the the the battlefield here we're going to describe all that in a second but this is how the battlefield opens up for the second and the third day but first let's talk about cannons if we were to walk all around the battlefield i could show you 400 of these cannons okay these are original civil war cannon barrels mounted on replica iron carriages the original carriages were made of wood now you can even see right here come on don't be shy some of these original cannon barrels have green barrels and some have black barrels okay the green or blue ones are made of bronzer brass those are made of caster wrought iron okay they all do essentially the same thing but there's one big difference these are the older ones these fire round cannonballs okay those the black ones are the newer ones they fire shells they are rifled like the rifling i described earlier those artillery tubes have grooves inside that make the shells fly out of the barrel and fly further and more accurate okay but they both both do essentially the same things you can take a 10 or a 12 pound solid piece of iron or lead and shove it down the barrel with a bag of black gunpowder until that bag ends up here you're going to puncture the bag with a spike or a pick okay and then i'm going to take something that makes a spark a friction primer i'm going to attach it to a rope i'm going to walk over here and i'm going to pull it okay now that little friction primer will make a tiny spark that will catch on to the bag of black gunpowder and a massive explosion will take place inside this barrel and that explosion will push the projectile out of here and this thing will fly out it can fly more than a half a mile maybe three quarters of a mile out of this gun twice as far out of the other gun and it could disable enemy cannons um it can sink ships in a naval battle it could knock holes in buildings it could mow through troops it could knock tree limbs down onto troops to wound and demoralize them but they have something worse of course they have shells that fly over the heads of the troops and explode overhead and rain down into big bits of metal okay now i'll bet you know who invented the exploding shell even if you don't know it and i'm looking at a piece of it now and it bears his name henry shrapnel okay he was a lieutenant or an officer in the english army and he invented this manner okay so think about this this shell or cannonball could explode okay it could either explode by percussion by hitting the ground so you well-placed shot could knock out five or ten soldiers or it could explode by a timed fuse over your head think about that fuse for a second these soldiers these artillery men not only had to know how to hit something but they had to know how long it took to get there so they could cut the fuse the right length so it would explode just at the right time when it was over your enemy's head pretty complicated stuff now if they were coming even closer to my cannon i might fire some of these okay think of the word grape or canister okay that's what it was called and this is a larger piece closer to grape but imagine 12 to 27 of these things packed into a coffee can in sawdust okay shove it down the barrel fire it out the can disintegrates and these things fly out like a big shotgun blast and make no mistake one of these could go through the cameraman go through someone standing behind the cameraman and go through another person okay it was only used as short range it was called the unwelcome messenger and if they were getting really close to my cannon i might put two of those canisters in there called yes double canister okay and no one charged double canister very effectively now come on over to the cannon because there's often a lot we can learn about a cannon first of all once you learn anything about shooting a gun you know it takes ten soldiers to work this gun to shoot it properly some budging somebody is sponging out the barrel with wet a wet sponge to make sure that there aren't sparks in here you know when you put a bag of gunpowder into it okay somebody is um you know sighting the gun somebody's actually loading the gun two people are running the gun forward because after the explosion every time the gun leaps off the ground and goes back it recoils eight feet or so okay so two people are running the gun back forward two people are running ammunition back and forth from the rear why do they do that well if the anti-mission blows up if the whole ammunition crate blows up two people died not the whole cannon not the whole battery so they kept it safely out of harm's way somebody's watching the effect of the fire saying little left little right and things like that somebody is in charge of this piece someone's in charge of this piece and another called a section okay now if these 10 men plus the 18 horses necessary to pull this gun and its ammunition wagons called k sounds and limbers they come together as a team in practice maybe they can do it four times a minute in battle they're going to be shooting it two or three times every minute if they were ordered to do so now we can come right up to the cannon and learn a lot and i haven't practiced on this cannon first of all i can see that you could probably still fire this gun there is a hole in the vent there there's nothing to prevent us from shooting this gun do not do this at home kids plus it's completely against the law to try to fire a gun on the battlefield um i see something on the side here it says 1862 this tube could have been in the battle of gettysburg let's look around to the front here i can't see a whole lot right here it's really hard to read but often you can see the serial number how much it weighs and these types of guns generally called napoleon guns the tubes alone weigh 1200 pounds you wonder why they don't get stolen okay um and then uh you know you can sometimes learn other things oh such as that this was made in memphis tennessee this is a confederate gun that actually could have been here which is pretty interesting okay now it might seem like these guns are very archaic but eventually before long they're going to figure out how to rifle them they already have that in the civil war during the civil war they figure out how to load it not from here but from the breach okay and that still seems kind of archaic but think about it this way take away the horses put some tracks on there and you have a tank it's not that different from what we're still using today hit me with any other questions you might have about cannons but we're going to work our way now out to the second and third days battlefield and start to talk about it now the first thing i want to talk about here is that you might notice that some of the confederate monuments are actually larger than the union monuments although i do see a confederate regimental monument over there to some mississippi soldiers but most of them are built to honor one all the confederate soldiers from that particular state therefore this one monument we're going to see first is to represent all the 32 regiments from north carolina that fought here let's take a quick break and i'll meet you there so here we are walking out toward the north carolina monument um you know uh and the sculptor a guy named gutson borglum you might know him because he actually sculpted mount rushmore um which is in the news sometimes and an iconic american thing he chose to put a wounded confederate officer come on forward a little bit with me and you'll be able to see it a little bit better urging his comrades to attack the union position over there right do you see it and you know the steady veterans sort of may be whispering into the ear of the worried raw recruit who you see just below the flag okay and the veteran is probably saying don't worry it'll all be over soon and you know so it would be one in four north carolinians who died at gettysburg um i'm sorry one in four confederates who died at gettysburg was a north carolinian and the north carolina troops are proud of that okay it's a little different you know i figure if i lived through a fight i did pretty well okay but back in the civil war the more soldiers you lost the more it meant you stuck to your post and you did your duty okay it's a different kind of war where um you know you don't wear camouflage a different kind of war where if someone's carrying the flag and he gets shot two other people will fight for the honor to drop their own gun and to pick up that particular flag it's the honor of it it's a war where when you're trying to get out of a place you know you might consider walking backward instead of turning and running just so your parents don't get a letter that you were shot in the back running away honor pervaded society in a way that we can't even understand okay and there are some particularly sad tales about soldiers dying and their last thoughts were how they were appearing how whether they were crying out with their wound or anything like that and it's hard to wrap your brain around come on a little further here because here it is the gettysburg battlefield and remember as i said all that happens after the first day is that both sides bring the remainder of their soldiers here okay until the yankees have maybe 85 000 soldiers over there and the southerners have maybe 65 or 70 000 soldiers over here okay but here's the important part the union forms and the face in the general shape of a fish hook okay we can see this fish hook here okay it starts over on little round top which is to the left of that big pointy hill there and then if you can follow me along that ridge where all those trees or monuments are that's cemetery ridge the union fish hook line will curve around where those trees are that's that high point cemetery hill it'll curve around to a place you can't see called culps hill okay so again culps hill cemetery hill cemetery ridge little round top you know 85 000 soldiers or so now the southerners show up and line up around it because that's what you do in the civil war right okay but this tells us a lot if mead the union commander needs to get a guy from here to here it's two miles lee needs to go six lee has fewer men on a much longer line he's strung out he's attenuated meat is compact he can shift his troops back and forth really easily okay the union also has the high ground little round top cemetery ridge cemetery hill and culps hill on his line and he's finally got the home field advantage mead does okay and in sports or war that is really important and lastly he's remaining on the defensive all huge advantages for the union the one thing the confederates have going for him at this point is having won the day before on july 1st and having won for the last year pretty much with some regularity okay so general lee comes up with a plan right i'm going to send 10 10 or 20 000 soldiers around to get maybe maybe even around the round tops and attack up in that direction then half as many on the other side of the line i'm going to crush the ends i'm going to crush the flanks of the union army and i will win this battle now we know that little round top will hold during the battle we know that on the second day the confederates don't push through they don't capture the main crest of culps hill that's why there's a third date of the battle and that's when lee supposedly reasons oh he's strong over there he's strong over on the other end he must be weak somewhere and from what i gather from what i've been told he must be weak here in the center okay or as martin sheen says in the gettysburg movie he must be weak in the center okay so that's what he's going to do that's when he conceives what we now call pickett's charge okay and imagine if you will 12 13 000 confederate soldiers all lined up in four or six lines again called ranks okay with mostly north carolina mississippi and tennessee troops around here all the way from that hill over to that side and then follow me over here if you will from over there imagine a line of confederate soldiers just behind the camera and then they're all the way to this next group of trees right and then three quarters of a mile more virginians that are all going to go across this open field here focusing on that largest clump of seven or eight trees to the left of the tall white shaft okay it's going to take 20 minutes across that field the union uh soldiers with shoulder carried weapons could shoot three times a minute the yankees have 50 cannons over there at least and they can fire those two three four times a minute okay 20 minutes you know 50 cannons three times a minute or so 5 000 union muskets also going off three times a minute okay you do the math okay and we're going to talk about this later when we get over to the union perspective okay but let me just say that a lot of people think robert e lee was crazy for making this attack this great general made a huge mistake here but i want to just say he's got the appalachian mountains eight miles away to his back okay he's in enemy territory okay he won the day before and he usually won against this army on other occasions right and on july 2nd few people know that georgians went across this very field and all the way over that clump of trees and made it the whole way maybe maybe with a lot more confederates maybe it'll work and i can only summarize it by saying that after the civil war um you know lee became president of washington college now known as washington and lee university okay and one of his soldiers apparently mustered the bravery maybe apocalypsely to say generally this is what you should have done at gettysburg instead of getting mad lee supposedly sat back smiled and said young man why didn't you tell me that before the battle even a fool like myself can see it all now and there it is okay we have to put ourselves in the shoes of those commanders and in this case a particularly dangerous and capable confederate commander made these decisions for all the reasons that he did and we now know it's not going to go so well and like i said we'll cover that when we get back to the union perspective now back to the car all right here we go so we're continuing again south on west confederate avenue and we're going to check out more of the confederate line here's our first confederate uh headquarters marker this one to general ap hill whose headquarters was a few hundred yards behind that particular marker and we'll just drive along here and see all sorts of additional cannons some of the stonewalls used by the troops and brigade plaque after brigade plaque for the confederates who are stacked up in this area for both the july 2nd and the july 3rd action see most of the confederate army is here for the july 2nd fighting which doesn't start till the afternoon but not all of them so there are more confederates showing up and fighting here at different times now of the next large monument we come to uh we're gonna come to the virginia memorial uh i'll let you think for a second about not only who's on top of the virginia monument but maybe who uh what the the soldier's horse's name is and of course i think you already figured out that it would be robert e lee and you can see him right there atop his horse not trigger but traveler we're going to loop around to the front of this because it's not just robert e lee there's a lot more on this memorial dedicated in 1917 this is approximately where pickett's virginians would have been positioned plus some other virginians as well under other commanders now the sculptor a guy named sivers came and put seven different virginia soldiers from different walks of life some rich some poor some young some old supposedly you could look at their feet at the various to try this and see that one's a doctor one's a farmer one's an attorney one's a professional soldier and as for robert e lee if you can see up there the people who knew lee after this was erected in 1917 that's said that's the best likeness of his face they ever saw and so should it be it is made from a mask of his face so it is his face up there on the monument and while in some circles uh if you weren't trying to cover a whole battlefield in two or three hours robert e lee would end up getting an entire biography in our entire tour but let's give him a minute right here graduating near the top of his class in 1829 robert e lee had been a professional soldier and did everything well most of that time he helped to build bridges build forts he fought seminole indians down around florida he's going to fight the mexican war with great distinction where he will earn two promotions and then during the civil war as he is simply able to confuse outflank whip and intimidate every commander that abraham lincoln could throw at him and you could say that mead is sort of the sixth one of those commanders depending on how you count it and we'll see how mead does uh we're going to see again i don't want to spoil the end for you here okay so robert e lee comes onto this battlefield a very experienced uh soldier and one with a great you know track record behind him he had basically tied once you know hadn't really lost yet and won all the others as we drive along this confederate line you know you just see that it's a long long line and we're still not all the way to the round tops yet you can see the monument for florida it's not a very large state memorial because there's only three regiments from florida fighting here and it's the smallest brigade in the whole confederate army three stars on the monument symbolize the three regiments from florida who actually fought here now if i were to take a little road off to the right here here behind the confederate lines i could show you some union monuments that's because the union army didn't even know where the confederate army was and the reverse was also true when they were just starting to take positions here on july 2nd so the yankees send a few hundred soldiers from maine and from the united states sharpshooter off into these woods over here they find the confederates some alabamians and more than 100 soldiers union soldiers in this case mostly become casualties and by the way a casualty is killed wounded captured or missing okay keep that in mind and it cost the union 100 casualties just to find the enemy but they found that the confederates were extending their lines along this ridge on which we drive and it might sound obvious it is obvious but you can see that the round tops are getting a little bigger as we get closer now you don't need me to tell you this but what's important is that sometimes the people making the plans for an attack are nowhere near where that attack will be made they might not be able to see the peculiarities of the ground nor how steep and intimidating and rocky the height south of town might be now i'm going to point out the peach orchard that you can see on your left here it's a slight rise in ground where you see some monuments and you might see a car going over at that point i'm mostly pointing that out now because you might not be able to see it too well when i point it out later now here we have two more memorials a woman holding a flaming cannonball over a dead confederate soldier that's the louisiana monument and the mississippi monument up here you can see that monumentation changed over the years the soldiers even have longer hair as befits the 1970s and you can see architectural standards changed the the style of the sculptures simply changed now here we are going to uh continue straight across the millerstown road i'll bet you only need one guest to know where the millerstown road goes although some people do get this wrong millerstown okay and we are continuing along the confederate line here and now we're entering the area where james longstreet's troops are he's one of the other confederate corps commanders and his soldiers will mostly make this largest attack on july 2nd 1863. his headquarters marker is right up here on the right his headquarters was in a field a couple hundred yards behind the line that's just where a major or lieutenant general should be and on the left here you see one of the five steel observation towers erected by the war department in 1895. um you have a great view of the battlefield from there we're not going to be going up there today but let me get your attention over to the right because you're now looking at the farm of dwight david eisenhower i mentioned him earlier um 34th president and he spent the last eight years of his life here often walking the fields with generals uh from america and from other countries and advocating for this battlefield in general as we passed the georgia and the south carolina memorials again placed generally where those troops fought see battlefield monuments are marking where something happened and this one of course south carolina has palmetto trees inscribed onto the sides of it because south carolina is of course the palmetto state now i like pointing out this little stone wall off to the right over here because it's not all crumbled down like the other walls that's what the stone walls would have looked like during the battle of gettysburg or so i picture it or so i can see in the photos that were taken in the days after the battle of gettysburg and i mean days they started just two or three days after the battle you can see now that we are getting closer to the round tops we are starting to get almost around the round tops like james longstreet or robert e lee wanted we're extending our lines along further extending the confederate line and making it harder and more unwieldy to actually manage you could see a farm over here i believe it's called the snyder farm over here and the american battlefield trust actually preserved a couple of acres right beyond this farm removing some of the last houses that were still on the emmitsburg road over here and look now we get our first good view of the round tops the big pointy and wooded big round top and you might be able to just catch views that little round top is cleared on its western face only so the western face of little round top had just by chance been cleared a couple of years before the battle by a young enterprising farmer and because you can see off of little round top not big round top but little round top you suddenly can have a better field of fire because wherever you can see you can shoot okay so all of a sudden you have this important union position over there and the confederates are going to come to attack it now the soldiers attacking the round tops will be from georgia texas arkansas and alabama the georgians texans and arkansans had to march eight miles before they got into position to make this attack on the second hottest day of the summer after marching a long ways to get here in the first place over gettysburg's most difficult terrain before they could even make it the attack but that is nothing compared to what some alabamians are going to have to do before they had to make their attack for right up here behind this stone wall that you might be able to see on the right is where uh evander law's alabamians were lined up again the stonewall was here already they were glad to use it and they had to march more than 23 miles from a place near chambersburg pennsylvania without sleeping just to get here and they had to march over a mountain in order to do it okay now when they got to gettysburg they are then going to have to have a half hour to rest before they're going to have to engage in a circuitous six mile flank march to get to position over here and when they got here they had but 25 minutes to rest before they're gonna have to charge to the left over here against plunging artillery fire some of them all the way to the top of big round top down the other side and then attack little round top four five six times so when these alabamians got here and you can see their monument here on the right uh erected in 1933 a lot of their canteens were empty and any of them that said they had water in the canteens they said it was steaming hot and we've all drank water like that it's not okay and by the way they tried to gather up those canteens and go and found that the closest water was inside union lines so they go off that way in search of water but the time for the attack has come so now these most exhausted troops on the entire battlefield are going to have to now make the first and most important attack of the day over by far the most difficult terrain gettysburg has to offer on the ascetic second hottest day of the summer carrying 50 pounds of stuff each without any water i can't even give this tour without water okay and you've all been in this position before right you've stayed up all night before i've done it before but i'm either working or having a good time i certainly wasn't marching over a mountain 20 some miles to get here um you know being prodded by officers and carrying 50 pounds of stuff um and you know when you do wake up then your mouth's dry your head's ringing and then i can go to sleep or chill out or something like that these guys are gonna have to then do some actual fighting after it okay so as we here approach the alabamians we're on the end of the confederate line so many people actually ask me why would you have the great general robert e lee have the most tired troops here make that important attack it's it's brigades here it could take you an hour or two to switch around two brigades and it's just a reality of war these guys are on the right they're the ones that make the attack and they're gonna have to suck it up and do it so these cannons you might be able to see on the right over here symbolically mark the end of the confederate line here we are on the end of one of the largest armies in the world it's a lot safer in the middle let me tell you you can see the flank of the entire lisa army so as we descend we are now the road was not here the avenue but we are descending toward where the confederates went they're going to have to march through here and all of a sudden we're going to enter the woods and you're going to see a huge terrain change instead of the nice open fields we have now entered the gettysburg sill marked by huge daya base or granite boulders okay these are volcanic rocks and in the civil war if there's a thorn bush in front of you and you're marching in line of battle you march through it there's a rock in front of you you climb over it if you can and if not you got to get out of line between the terrain the terrible huge rock some of which are as large as a car or even a small house and the plunging union artillery fire the sharpshooter union sharpshooters firing in here the southern line will be broken and jagged even before it reaches the enemy now as we cross by one of gettysburg's many farms here we're now on the foothills of big round top again the big pointy hill is big round top on our way toward little round top okay and um we're gonna cross a run called plum run soldiers tried to stop and drink out of it but their sergeants behind them were keeping them moving making sure they don't stop you gotta move toward the attack and take it to the enemy now if we were to take this vehicle and drive up to the parking lot a third of the way up big round top and let's just say we had some 19 year old soccer players with us or something like that and we decided to march to the top of big round top they'd be able to do it we all would but they'd be breathing heavy at the top and they would not be doing it the whole way nor from the steep southern slope that the southerners had to go up nor carrying 50 pounds of stuff each after staying up all night okay it is a very difficult climb and many of these same alabamians have to go all the way to the top of this hill this very rugged and difficult hill before going down now before we reach little round top note that there would be union skirmishers uh guys out in front of the army you're looking to slow down and give warning of the enemy approaching there would be skirmish fire in here and they would have seen some of the same wildlife that we see right now there have been vultures here for um centuries i believe there are 17 species of snakes in the gettysburg national military park we have lots of deer and all sorts of other things so it's a great place to you know explore great trails here to also connect with nature and reflect upon our shared history um you're with the american battlefield trust as we tour around the gettysburg battlefield and we're on big round top and here we are coming down toward little round top and imagine if we would alabamians off to the right here mostly some more alabamians and texans off to the left here they're going to come off a big round top a very strong position in itself but they couldn't stay there their goal is to find the enemy and push them off the next hill or to get behind them if they can to unhinge the union army and the yankees were sitting right on the edge of little round top here's the saddle between the two hills and that uh sort of spur over there it's called vincent spur that's where the 20th maine famously fought against the alabamians over there okay and it is in fact an important moment but all the regiments on little round top were important in fact you have pennsylvania new york and michigan soldiers who had any of those regiments broken completely uh you know little round top might have fallen and to see the import of little round top we're going to get out up here because if you see anything at gettysburg it should probably be little round top and while we're looking just let me say one more thing joshua chamberlain is the colonel of the 20th maine he's very well known okay and he is more than anyone i think the person who tells the story for the fight for a little round top but the next colonel over dead within a year the next commander over dead within a year the next commander over dead within a year not only did joshua chamberlain survive the civil war and the many decades to follow but he also was an excellent writer history is written by winners who live and he survived and he could write really well and he will tell the story of little roundtop more than anyone else sometimes changing that story from year to year as practically all of us do all right here we go come on over here this is little round top again if you see anything at gettysburg it should be this and specifically i strongly feel that you have no idea how good the view is uh until you actually crest this so come on excuse me so it's one thing to look at a hill from another direction i think you could see it sticks up above all else that you see but as we walk along these paths these paths you know were first sort of tread by the people who just started visiting the battlefield first by the soldiers themselves there was no road up to little round top it was very difficult to get up here at the time so let me just be silent while you enjoy this incredible view just look at this bursting upon your view a far better view than you ever could have expected let's walk out a few steps when you're ready watch your step please cameraman it's andy poulton behind the camera right now so i have a lot to say here as you might expect okay now just think of it this way this looks a lot like it did at the time of the battle and the park service works very hard to make this as such all the trees in front of us were here at the time of the battle but some of those trees over there should be actually a lot further back okay and if you actually look over there you can start to see the confederate line do you see that most distant tree line up there it's right below the mountains the most distant tree line that's seminary ridge so stick with me for a second the confederate line goes from there to that gap in the woods that's where we cross the emmitsburg road it's going to continue along this way to the long street tower sticking up over the road over over the trees there it's going to continue all way over there if you go far enough you'll see a barn with three white ventilators just to the left of that statue there that's the qadore farm now if you look above from that you can see a steeple that's seminary ridge that's where the seminary is okay the confederate line will continue that's only half of it it'll then go all the way around through town beyond the light blue water tower you see in the distance over to culps hill okay it is six miles long you know just less than seventy thousand soldiers now the union line right is supposed to sort of start here on little round top making somewhat of a b line to that largest pennsylvania memorial over there and then curving around the light blue water tower over to culps hill maybe 80 80 85 000 soldiers okay but the guy in command over here dan sickles okay this is a brave enough guy a guy who had seen some fighting already but who didn't like the ground just north of little round top it's low it's wooded and these intervening woodlots that you see here which are very well represented um sort of would have gotten in the way of his artillery the enemy could leap frog through them in order to get and compromise his position he worried and fretted about this all morning until on his own without specific orders to do so he's going to move his 10 000 soldiers out to the peach orchard where he could better use his artillery now let me pause for a second to talk about sickles he is what we call a political general okay he didn't go to west point he didn't have a lot of pre-war military training or anything like that he's learning on the job and when at the beginning of the war he was able to use his money influence and power to you know secure a colonel see raising his own regiment his own brigade in some ways trying to fund that okay and by gettysburg he's got ten thousand soldiers and we're going to talk about him a little bit more now to be clear he's all the way out at the peach orchard which you really can't see from here as i promised you but know this he takes his ten thousand men he takes half of them and puts them out where those red barns are way out there you might think i'm pointing to the wrong thing because it's closer to the enemy line than to his own line okay so he takes him out there and then he takes the other half and bends them through these trees to that pile of rocks right over there called devil's den my favorite place in the world okay so instead of being out in front of little round top he is i'm instead of being honored he's out in front of it like this right forming a point or a salient okay now to his credit he might think he has a little round top cover if he thought it was important right because he's right in front of it but his line ends there not right there where he is right down there at little at devil's den there right where do the confederates come from big round top okay so i guess what's going to happen here is that the confederates will um just show up on big round top rest for a little bit because you got to rest on big round top walk off of there walk up on little round top the yankees lose the hill the confederates scare into retreat the largest army in the world and we live in a much different place today no and it's no because of that guy governor campbell warren you see his statue up there this dude is the chief engineer for the union army and if he knows anything if a topographical engineer knows anything he knows topography the lay of the land and he is horrified when he sees no union soldiers on this important position now through his efforts within about 20 minutes he is able to get a brigade about 1300 soldiers over that side of the hill five minutes before the southerners attack you could say it's the same five minutes they're resting on big round top but you need to rest on big round top try it yourself and then stay up all night and carry 50 pounds of stuff and see if you need to rest for five minutes okay so now we're going to crest over to that other side of the hill and talk about where the fighting took place over there so follow me i have something cool to show you on the way and to tell some more stories please watch your step little round top was much more rugged during the battle at least we have some flatness going on now you can see some cannons up here right they were under the command of a guy named charles hazlitt okay these cannons had to be hauled up here by hand i already told you that these tubes can weigh 800 900 1200 pounds okay and the soldiers who fought in hazlitt's battery they didn't say oh i saw a lot of my friends die today they didn't say oh my god what a terrible battle and i witnessed it they said it was really hard to get those cannons on little round top on july 2nd okay because they are heavy now i also know that they would not have put a cannon here okay how do i know that what happens when you shoot a cannon okay it recoils back i promise you they would have only wanted to take this cannon up here once okay now the story goes that the commander hazlet is up here with his friend general weed wheat is in command of a brigade that comes up here to reinforce and wheat is supposedly standing come with me watch your step supposedly standing on this rock right here i'm not making this up okay and weed is standing here and he um is shot mortally wounded and he says i am cut in two i want to see hazlitt hazlitt bends down on this rock to hear his friends dying words and he is shot dead upon the body of his dying friend okay and this rock carving you just saw there we'll show you a better picture of it was actually carved by 1864 at the latest these are our oldest monuments on the battlefield we don't know who carved it or anything like that but this is how we understand history a little bit we don't just use the accounts we use the battlefield let's continue onward from here because here we are up on the crest of the hill these are the rest of hazlitt's guns these are parrot rifles because they are a cast iron barrel with a wrought iron reinforcement band keeping it from exploding back there at the breach okay and that's why all of these guns say robert p parrott on the side they might also say west point foundry which this one does because they were made at wpf the west point foundry come on now as we walk down to the lower parts of the hill again take the view in to the right i mean imagine the view you have as a canon ear as somebody just witnessing history here little round top you see why it's popular how you can you know see in every direction and an obvious place to put some cannons at least if you're firing in that direction firing this way or the other way it's a pretty thin hill and your cannons end up lined up one behind the other this largest monument it looks like a castle in front of me is to the 44th new york uh they're from albany and around there and they chose to make their monument 44 feet high because it's the 44th they also are to the 12th new york so they chose to make the interior of their chamber 12 feet wide they put symbolism into these monuments okay come on a little further here we also have you know presidential and presidential hopeful visits are coming up here all the time and the most famous one that i can think of is when during the peace accords in the 1970s when jimmy carter and menachem began of israel and anwar sadat of egypt were camp david's only in those mountains over that way it's not very far away so they came up to little round top and the secret service had read stories about confederates at devil's den shooting union soldiers on little round top and because the secret service had read that they posted secret service members at devil's den yes they were using history to understand their jobs today and we're not going to go all the way up the tower or up the castle but we'll go just past it here because this is the side of the hill where everything happened you can see this side of the hill you can see in the picture that it was only partially wooded these rocks depicted here in this photo um are those same rocks that are right over there okay so we know what the battlefield looked like because within days of the battle uh photographers were here taking pictures and we know what a lot of this battlefield looked like so here we are on the side of the hill where everything really happened in the attack and defense of little round top okay this is about 5 p.m or so 5 15 on july 2nd 1863 when the union army comes and occupies this side of the hill it's vincent's brigade strong vincent you might remember him from the gettysburg movie let's see how professors can fight first in his class at harvard not a whole lot of military experience but he was one of those guys who could apparently arrive on a battlefield in civilian clothing and you know people would listen to him for look to him for leadership we've all met people like that in our lives this was him and he was a 25 year old i believe and he was smart he did not put his men on top of little round top he put his soldiers down there not on the crest but on the military crest on the military crest you can shoot over the brow of the hill and increase your field of fire on the military crest you don't form a convenient silhouette on the top on the military crest the cannon can shoot over your head and most importantly on the military crest if you have to fall back you're still on the hill vince it was smart to put his men from michigan new york pennsylvania and maine all the way over in the woods they had just gotten into position they didn't have time to build the impressive stone walls that you see here today that was built just after the fighting was over a lot of good it did them then just as the alabamians on the upper slopes of the mountain and the texans on the lower slopes come off and attack this position the texans and some of the alabamians arrive first and they attacked here and they're repulsed they attack again and they're repulsed again okay now some of the clever texans start to work their way around the men of the 16th michigan and through a mistaken order these michiganders actually begin many of them to fall back with their flag the texans advance to this plateau right here they are about to capture little round top when the guy we passed earlier with the shiny nose his name is patty o'rourke and he's colonel the 140th new york infantry and 540 new yorkers coming up i don't even know if there was bullets in their guns but it was enough to scare these texans who broke and ran off the hill they fell back to the woods again and the woods were a good hundred yards further so each of these advance was advances was difficult in a deadly step of death but soon the fight was moving on and rolling into the woods where some of the other soldiers who had to climb to the top of big round top were starting to arrive okay so now it gets particularly intense as the pennsylvania soldiers and the main soldiers are now battling alabamians and it goes back and forth like a great wave until one third of the alabamians are down a third of the men from maine are down both sides are already looking through the cartridge boxes for bullets of their dead and wounded comrades the union has already extended their lines and they see the southerners forming for one final charge and i think you know the story joshua chamberlain on the end told his exhausted soldiers to put bayonets on the end of their guns and charge down into the weary confederates who having stayed up all night second hottest day of the summer 50 pounds carrying it marching over a mountain attacking this position four or five times maybe even six had finally haven't had enough and they ran like a herd of wild cattle back up big round top because you usually retreated from whence you came and from what i've read a lot of these guys are happy to be captured at that point because they could finally get what they really wanted a little bit of rest and maybe a little bit of water okay you're not thinking about rotting away in a northern prison at that point you're thinking that we're all this way i need to rest right now keep this in mind when you are tired hungry and thirsty soldier or civilian you're thinking about food water and sleep not in their case independence and slavery in the minutia of battle but although the confederates never captured little round top they had great success on the second day after it changed hands three times and fighting 50 more terrible costly and bloody than little round top devils then falls to the confederates the wheat field over there changes hands six times we'll ride through that soon enough and eventually falls to the confederates too the southerners roll over the peach orchard and now they have the they're going to try to make a bid to cut right into the middle through a big gap in the middle of the union fish hook why is there a gap in the middle of the fish hook well do you remember what dan sickles did remember he made a salient general mead sees that he has done this he is furious but he has to support sickles and he's going to take 10 or 15 000 soldiers from other parts of the line those soldiers have to come from somewhere and he's going to reinforce sickles and some of those soldiers came right from the middle okay so we are going to now explore some of these places check out devil's den and the wheat field from our vehicle and we'll explore and see if we can get the confederates to push through the union line or if the yankees will make a steady defense all right and even going down little round top i'll encourage you when we clear these trees here to look off to your left even the lower slopes of little round top provide just an excellent view and you can see what a commanding position it was okay so we're going to go down into that very ground over there know that in the decades after the civil war there were a bunch of amusement parks around here i mean you could take a trolley over here there was a roller rink a dance hall two restaurants a photographic studio a casino yes a casino in gettysburg what a crazy thought and eventually so many people lived right around here that a little town called sedgwick because of its proximity to the john cedric monument came came about and it actually had its own post office now as we come down the wheatfield road this is one of the few roads we're going on today on the battlefield proper that was actually here during the battle you can see my favorite type of fence over here a stone fence with a rail fence on top of it we like to call that hog tight and cow high tight enough for your pigs tall enough for your cattle okay and that's apparently the type of fence that was there at the time now we're going to turn left here and enter another happy place the valley of death this is all that area between devil's den and little round top and house ridge which is a ridge you can see rising right up in front of us now okay and late in the afternoon after the fighting for devil's den and little round top while confederates were pouring through this valley samuel wiley crawford led a gallon charge down to try to blunt the last attempt of the confederates to capture a little round top from this side but look at it from here just look i'll give you a couple seconds here all the confederates practically use the same word to describe that hill and let me tell you one of the reasons you have to come here is because no matter what it looks like on video or on film or in a picture it doesn't look like the almost sheer wall it looks like when you stand here the southerners called it impregnable and so it proved to be despite numerous attacks despite great attempts to get it the union held firm it was supposedly like a volcano because remember you have thousands of union infantry up there shooting their guns and with cannons blazing forth the smoke was rising from the top of it little round top i wanted to see how hard it was on my second trip here i took about i don't know three gallons of water as many as would fit in my backpack to try to make it heavier and decided to run up little round top up this side and by the way i didn't walk here from 30 miles away i didn't stay up all night i was i had a very pleasant evening and a good sleep and yet and i was in shape this is when i was about 22 i was doubled over two thirds of the way up unable to advance it's a longer slope than you expect and it's a steeper slope than you expect so just keep that in mind so the fighting between devil's den and little round top and devil's den is right over here uh coming through we're going to go through it on your right up here is actually interspersed with the slaughter pen in between the two slaughter pen is a bunch of big rocks which was as you expect especially bloody as as arkansans texans georgians struggled against troops from maine and new york and new jersey in this general vicinity and we're not going to go into all the fighting here it's far too confusing but just know this the big rocks of devil's den are now visit visible on your right over there and you know the local legend says that this was called devil's den before the battle but there's no written evidence of that the most common story for why it's called devil's den is uh goes back to local people again who said there was a huge 20 or 30 foot snake who would eat little kids for breakfast every day it had the width the size of a man's waist and it could swallow a whole dog and they said that they could never kill or capture that terrible reptile and that he died here in his lair and that's why this is called devil's dead you know for my part it might be called devil's den because of the terrible fighting that took place here in july of 1863 look at the natural beauty of it too and that's why i think it's called devil's den because if you look around the country devils lake devil's tower devil's slipper devil's bath the other devil's dens they're all rocky areas and indeed some of the immigrants who inhabited these parts actually said that you know the devil had put rocks in their field to punish them and make it difficult so rocks themselves are the devil now we're not going to get into all the fighting but i do like to point out this position on the right here this is the home of the rebel sharpshooter it is a famous photograph taken from right right toward those rocks with a dead confederate soldier there he had been dragged to that location but nonetheless the fame of the photo endures and people go to visit it all the time some laying down in the same spot here we have one of our living witnesses from the battle this tree was here during the battle of gettysburg and now we're going to get another great view of what it looked like as the confederates captured devil's den fell back recaptured it and then faced with the sheer wall of little round top they could go no further so we're going to continue along the line here now up here on the right you're going to catch a view of the 124th new york monument with their colonel augustus van horn ellis placed there in 1884. augustus van horn ellis was here during the battle and he decided to go in on horseback and lead his men in a in a almost certainly suicidal charge against the confederates down the slope to the left and when some of one of the other captains said no don't go in on your horse he simply said the men must see us today summarizing simply one of the critical roles of a civil war officer to display bravery sometimes reckless bravery in front of your troops while you're under fire he will be killed here his major will be killed here the lieutenant colonel will be badly wounded and that regiment the smallest one to fight around devil's den will suffer more men killed than any of the others and now we're driving through rose woods again the most terrible woods of the civil war if you ask me 9 000 casualties in and around these woods in just about three or four hours on july 2nd 1863. you've got a new hampshire colonel named cross going down here the highest ranking soldier from the state of indiana getting killed in here and it gets particularly intense as we approach this field right here this is the wheat field this is the whirlpool of death it was said you could walk from one side of the other just stepping on bodies it was a carpet of blue gray and red and we're still trying to figure it out because first the union soldiers were facing that way and confederates obliged them and came from that side but then more southerners come from there and then more union came from behind me southerners come from there and there while union soldiers come from there and behind me again and it went back back and forth six times it changed hands until eventually at the end of the day the southerners couldn't hang on to it it sucked troops into this whirlpool of death and ultimately there was a terrible no man's land between the lines and the cries from the wounded that evening were simply unbearable hard to imagine you would not want to see this fight and yet this is just one of numerous fights at gettysburg and now we're going to go around a hill called the stoney hill i'll let you see if you can guess why it's called that as we can see the site of an aid station and one of the most famous monuments at gettysburg the irish brigade monument okay they've got the irish wolfhound they've got the celtic cross up there and these are new york city irishmen along with some of the other soldiers that they allowed into their brigade the smallest brigade of gettysburg because they had attacked the sunken lane in fredericksburg and before that the sunken road or bloody lane at sharpsburg or antietam now here we are going around the stoney hill intense fighting going on here um on july 2nd 1863 associated with the wheat field which is off in that direction now very hard to stay oriented even when you're actually in the car reason number 70 why you need to come here and get here on your own and auto tour yourself around or better yet get yourself a licensed battlefield guide to take you around answer all your questions i hope that you are are having many questions you'd like answered as a result of this video that's how american history works that's how history works and i hope you're anxious to learn more and make that trip to gettysburg i think all americans and indeed um people from other countries as well should make this trip to this to this civil war battlefield so we can understand what happened here and better understand our democracy and of course what the gettysburg address ultimately came to stand for excuse the side note there so here we are we're heading north i can see a farm in front of me called the trosso farm as we turn back onto the wheat field road little round top is a half mile off to my right the peach orchard is less than a half a mile off to my left and there we are heading there and the reason that we're even out here is because of dan sickles whose headquarters was in that trosso farm i just mentioned there and he's most famous before the civil war for having a little incident you know when he shot and killed his wife's lover in front of the white house haven't we all but he's a respectable murderer and a congressman at the time and he turns himself in and him and his clever lawyer as well as another real crack team among other defenses said used a brand new defense something no one had ever used successfully before temporary insanity and he will be the first man in american history to get off in part on temporary insanity and a few years later here he is commanding 10 000 soldiers at gettysburg and me and my nerdy friends like to call him temporarily insane for moving out to the peach orchard which you can see over there he moved his troops right up to the enemy and took up a formation that could be assaulted from numerous angles so it's hard to say that it was a really good idea but dan sickles did two things a he lived longer than any of the other core commanders at gettysburg and when you don't have anybody to argue with you you can make a pretty compelling argument and secondly as an older man he went back to congress with one thing in mind and that is to found the sickles bill which did indeed create the gettysburg national military park so later when asked sickles um hey why is there no monument to you at gettysburg he said that whole damn battlefield is my monument and he could kind of say that he would die not long after the 1913 reunion where he was a big hit for the other veterans that were here now we are now heading east we are now some mississippi soldiers who are headed toward the trosso farm again that's where sickle's headquarters is okay we're going to talk about him again in a second but we are just moving with a huge wave this is the largest attack at gettysburg larger than pickett's charge a total of 15 800 confederates all moving from texas alabama um arkansas georgia um and and florida as well as a couple other states mixed in there now as we approach here you might be able to see a little monument sticking up among the orchard over there dan sickles was right there during the battle when a confederate shell comes in and it doesn't hit him near the leg it doesn't land near him it strikes him square in the leg and rips off a leg just below the knee dangling by skin and he is said to have been carried off the field coolly smoking his cigar instructing his staff to complete the amputation of the leg which they did and bathe the leg in alcohol so they could save it now just so i can keep moving nope you can see what an artillery shell can do to a brick building over there okay uh there's a big hole in the trussel farm and if we were here at the time of the battle you'd be able to see dead horses all around here because they were trying to capture some cannons here um and uh there's actually some photos that show horses penned up against that house a very sad looking scene in any case dan sickles uh survived the battle uh of course went on to live a very long life as i mentioned but he took friends to visit his leg bones for the remaining years of his life and it is still in one of the army medical museums outside of washington dc and we call this guy temporarily insane um i'd like to reconsider that but here we are al uh mississippians moving forward toward the union line in the distant tree line but to call it a line is an exaggeration there are no union troops ahead of us at least not any foot soldiers in fact all the way from a quarter mile three quarters of i'm sorry all the way from almost a half a mile over all the way down to here there is nothing but some cannons in front of us can 3 000 confederates mississippi alabama and florida push through this part of the line well we're now coming over to the union line so we can see okay here's one of our other battlefield houses this is the george likert house a big hospital there during the civil war and if you look over there in the woods you may or may not be able to catch a new jersey monument but i'd like to point out those woods because for you movie fans gettysburg movie fans that's where joshua chamberlain and the 20th maine were on the third day of the battle not a mile over at the field of pickett's charge just to say what you can do with a novel you don't always have to tell the truth it's a novel that's why it's a novel in any case here we are in the union line right and you're going to see a lot of cannons here and there are as many as 20 or 30 cannons here to oppose the 3 000 confederates coming up through the swale to the left that we just went through but big guns little soldiers it's like shooting mosquitoes with a rifle and and the big cannons are eventually not going to be able to stop the infantry you need foot soldiers to fight foot soldiers i said this before and it's still true and here they are coming through the swale everyone could see it and my favorite general winfield scott hancock shows up and roars my god is this all the men we have here after leading one of his brigades over to this area to stem the assault he realizes that it's not enough and he sees one regiment over here the first minnesota you can see their monument there with a guy running on top of it and he decides hancock decides he has to sacrifice these men and without much thought he sends these 262 men from minnesota into a solid line of alabama and florida troops over there and in less than half an hour 82 percent of them were killed or wounded but it slowed down the confederates for a little while long enough for general mead himself and others to bring up some reinforcements the confederate assaulted assault was blunted and you know hancock was later asked you know who knew that these soldiers had you know mothers daughters sons parents and loved ones at home would you make this order again knowing this terrible slaughter and without thought he said absolutely because 260 men to save the nation is the type of decision i have to make and there you have it that's the difficulty of being a great general officer in the civil war not how well you how good you are at tactics not how good of a horseman you are you need to be a great communicator you need to be a great tactician and strategist you need to be you know inspirational but more than anything you need that moral fiber that so few people had at the time at least at that level could you imagine making an order like that and that's just one of the 30 or 40 different engagements he was in and then again and again and living with it knowing you're not always going to get it right that's one of the difficulties and that's why so few people were so well suited for high command core command and army command and why so few people are good at it now with this with this charge pushing the confederates back here the fighting on the south end of the gettysburg battlefield you know has subsided it's pretty much over at this point right so to summarize the confederates took devil's den and took uh the peach orchard and they gained some ground but the union is still in possession of the ground they want to be in charge of right and had the battle of gettysburg ended right here it still would have been the bloodiest battle of the civil war it's that much larger than everything else okay so we're going to check out the other side of the fighting but first not to be outdone by new york or anybody pennsylvania made sure they had the largest monument here so we got to take a look at it erected in 1910 for 182 thousand dollars it's got the names of all the 34 534 30 men from pennsylvania who fought here on 90 plaques around the base you might be able to see some of the eight foot statues that ring the monument and on top even if you can't see it that's a 21-foot goddess of victory in peace made entirely of melted down civil war cannon barrels that's right and no they weren't melted down right after the battle they didn't just leave them here and melt them down the guns were used for the rest of the civil war and eventually became museum pieces and they simply had too many of them so here we are going over to the other side of the line now remember we have covered the first day we've covered the second day on the south end but now we're going to head over to the union right flank the confederate left copes hill and east cemetery hill and we're going to talk about some of that you're with the american battlefield trust we're turning out of the tawny town road here and while we're going from one side of the fish hook to the other um let me just say that you know you're taking right now a standard two or three hour driving tour of the gettysburg battlefield with just a couple of stops this is what the more than 150 guides um you know do regularly and take this standard tour and give it to people and you know we are rigorously tested not only to make sure we know our stuff but also to make sure that we can tell the story of the battle of gettysburg so i know i sound a little bit like a commercial i know i'm biased but i sincerely believe that you should a come to gettysburg and the first time you come you should get yourself a licensed battlefield guide so you can find out some of the things you want to know okay you can ask somebody who is likely obsessed with this battle and the people who fought in it and the people who lived here to answer your questions and i think it'll get you a little bit more into american history now what we're doing now is like i said going across the fish hook so we're in the union rear back here would be massive union hospitals starting to gather people together by brigade and by division there was a huge artillery park out in this field over here where the union with their interior lines could shift cannons uh and the ammunition they needed uh back to the other parts of the line it was an extraordinarily important thing that the union was able to have these interior lines and shift the troops back and forth and general mead used that advantage throughout the battle so now right here you can't see much but trust me off to the left you're starting to see gettysburg's fourth hill i call it powers hill you might be able to see some monuments over there this was a huge union artillery position that sat behind the union lines great position to have and i'm really happy for those of you who are members and supporters of the american battlefield trust the trust was able to add to and more than triple the land that the park service had on power so proper and now it's all turned over to the american people the park service steward stewards it and was able to clear the entire hill as it was clear of its timber during the battle and here we are we have almost traversed from one side of the fish hook to the other as we come up to the baltimore pike now there used to be a place where people would enter the park over here and they would see a 36 hole mini golf course and i liked golfing there and all but the owners didn't want to run it anymore so they opted to sell to the american battlefield trust so for those of you members who helped us to preserve that position there soon enough all of the mini golf equipment will be down and we will be able to see the battlefield much more like what it looked like especially given that this is the main artery entering the gettysburg battlefield so instead of seeing fake rocks that look like devil's den we'll actually see a battlefield similar to what it actually looked like and you might be able to catch our preserved forever sign over there again powers hill off to our left and we're going to take a right up here soon and we're going to make our way meandering over toward culps hill the union right flank okay we are still meandering our way over to cope's hill but know this it's hard to see but off to our right is a sluggish creek called rock creek guess what it's full of rocks okay and here on this position there were new jersey soldiers actually overlooking the creek and shooting at confederates who were trying to cross in a massive attack that's going to take place over here not as large as the one against little round top and the wheat field and whatnot but half as large you're talking about 5 000 soldiers or more in this general vicinity fighting so here we are entering a place called spangler's meadow terrible fighting here indiana and massachusetts troops were actually slaughtered here because of a mistaken order other troops were actually gunned down by cannons on powers hill off to the left because of friendly fire and bad communications but spangler spring is mostly known and you'll be able to get a view of the spring over here for there was be there was nice cold clear water here on the night of july 2nd okay and uh supposedly troops from both sides forgot their differences it was right between the lines and they gathered at the waters of spangler spring and they fraternized and hung out but you know there's a shred and truth in every myth we have three accounts that suggest that there were soldiers both drinking from it at different times and even a couple of times where troops from both sides drank at the same time but in all those cases each time they realized that they were among the enemy in the dark they got the heck out of there okay they didn't just stop fighting and and fight this way and and start drinking water together not during a battle now we are now on lower cope's hill i call it lower culture because there are two culps hill a lower one and guess what an upper one okay the union constructed earthworks and you can at the edge of the woods catch these earthworks going all the way up the hill okay and there will be some better times to catch them but there were earthworks they were of earth of course and they were also of stone and logged sometimes as well and the yankees occupied this hill but when dan sickles sent soldiers over to little little round top or needed them mead sent five of the six brigades of the 12th corps that's who's occupying this area off this hill so when the southerners arrived there were no union soldiers on this lower kelp's hill the yankees could barely even cover upper culpsil now the confederates captured it but you just saw all sorts of yankee monuments on it right you saw union monuments okay that's because the next day on july 3 the union came and took it back in seven hours of straight bloody fighting here we have another confederate regimental monument the second maryland in those troops as well as virginia troops on the night of july 2nd came and captured this hill and what they didn't know was that they were only 160 yards from the baltimore pike the lifeline of the union army let me explain remember i told you how long the confederate line was wrapping around the fish hook well one good thing about the length of that line is that it controlled eight of the ten roads going in and out of gettysburg the southerners had eight of the ten roads the yankees had two roads left one was dirt and one was crushed white limestone and that's the baltimore pike just 160 yards away so the marylanders actually put a marker down there and it shows the furthest advanced point of um their movement toward the baltimore pike but they didn't know how close they were they had no idea coming up culps hill over here you can see the tallest general in the union army john white geary first mayor of san francisco governor of pennsylvania and i won't even bother trying to explain all this look at all these monuments if you can see them and i see the different core insignia on little round top you might have seen a bunch of maltese crosses there's greek crosses and stars and uh you know circles or half moons it's like you know lucky charms and you see uh that what you what you learn is that the union soldiers actually had so many soldiers your reinforcements that they would send someone forward send someone else to rest and refit and then switch and switch and switch for seven hours the southerners had no hope of keeping up and the yankees held this hill so now by the night of july 2nd and then into the intense fighting on the morning of july 3rd the union soldiers have held little round top they've held copes hill they now have little lower copes hill back all the confederates are really holding now is devil's den and um and the peach orchard which they are going to crown with some artillery but nonetheless the yankees are still in a pretty strong position here it's general lee's move so real quick up here i want to drive you around the summit of culps hill and mainly show you uh one monument of course the road used to go in front of this soldier so you would see his front side instead of his backside but that is george sears green rhode island born 1801 died 1899 he didn't want any part of any other century and he was the oldest union general here at gettysburg if we were to go into these woods we would still see all sorts of earthworks going all the way down the hill these are the earthworks of a famous unit called the iron brigade so here we are coming off of cultural onto a shoulder of kulps hill called stevens knoll stevens is wounded during the battle commanding a main battery and you might be able to see the equestrian statue to henry warner slocum who's commanding the troops in this area here there's going to be a terrible attack by the confederates swinging through the fields in your right to attack the gibraltar that is east cemetery hill over there this fighting is taking place similar to the time at cults hill in the dark in the twilight and the southerners uh come all the way through town we're talking about louisianians and north carolinians and they punch through the thin union line these are troops who had fought on the first day and the yankees don't have enough men to man their line and the southerners punch through capture the whole crest of east cemetery hill but the union sends reinforcements and where are the confederate reinforcements well that tells the story of gettysburg wherever the southerners had some success there come the union reinforcements the yankees had more men they had the interior lines and general mead and general hancock and others were able to use those advantages and put troops where they were needed in fact you know being there with the most troops first is one of the key rules of the civil war it really helps you win so here we are you can see how close we had been to the baltimore pike again crushed white limestone you need a good road to get your ammunition up and to get your wounded away okay and had the southerner simply captured and controlled this road the union army would have had to either leave or fight to get it back that's how important this road was to the union army now here we are driving down cemetery hill and we are going to talk more now about pickett's charge we got to make our way over there but first you can see some of the land on the left that the american battlefield trust has permanently preserved maybe you caught our sign in there the trust has slowly bought uh you know small parcels along the baltimore pike and uh along the tony town road and of course more substantial ones along willoughby's run on the first days field and of course general lee's headquarters and portions of seminary ridge next to it now we're going to sneak up to sort of into the middle of the fish hook by going cross country over here this is hunt avenue hunt commanded all the union artillery at gettysburg at least nominally and you might be able to catch a view of it but um here at the museum in the visitor center which is right through these trees over there you might seem to see what looks like a circular barn something that is uh was prevalent in this part of south central pennsylvania in the circular barn actually it's not a barn at all it's actually housing the 400 foot long 50 foot tall painting in the round from the 1880s called the cyclorama it depicts tens more than 10 000 individual soldiers involved in a critical moment at pickett's charge it's a it's a painting in the round it's a multimedia experience very impressive not cheesy in the least bit i strongly recommend you go see it here we are we're cutting back across where we're getting closer to cemetery ridge and we're not far from where we started the tour and right in front of me here is general mead's headquarters lee made his headquarters in the home of a widow and so did general meade and on the night of july 2nd 1863 in half of that house in one of the two rooms in the house mead gathers his more trusted generals together and asked these very capable soldiers what is the condition of your command what should we do should we advance should we retreat what do you think okay now mead and his soldiers uh again capable people decide you know what let's let let's stay here at gettysburg but let's let lee attack us that worked pretty well the day before um on the way out of this meeting mead is said to have pulled aside juan general john gibbon and say to him given if lee attacks tomorrow it would be on your front and that's important because if true george gordon mead just outguessed robert e lee and he can be the first commanding general to do so and gibbon would be ready and meade would be ready the next day now i've heard one other person suggest to me once that mead also then went over to hancock and said hancock if lee attacks tomorrow it'll be on your front and then went over to newton newton if lee attacks tomorrow it'll be on your front and if so i would respect mead even more as a leader if he's just using that to inspire some of his troops in any case so here you've got the union army all ready to go and the union is waiting and waiting and july 3rd unlike july 2nd is not the second hottest day of the summer it is the hottest day of the summer and there they are waiting on cemetery ridge and unlike today there is absolutely no wind it's a perfectly calm day it's a very hot day and many people are beginning to think there's not going to be a battle this day so here we are where you can see we're going by the pennsylvania memorial once again coming at it from the other side so here we are on cemetery ridge we're coming to the most densely populated with monuments part of the whole battlefield because who wouldn't want their monument here at the climax of the battle or at least what most people call the climax of the battle we also have one of our living witnesses up here this is a a locust tree i believe that was actually a witness to the battle of gettysburg it's not only the big trees that survived this long we have pictures of that tree every decade or two since the civil war and i will not even bother trying to talk about all the monuments you see up here but you might see a particularly few interesting ones the tallest one over here that i pointed out earlier the tall white shaft that's the united states regulars okay that's the actual us army that was here before those units and as opposed to the others called volunteers i'll say that there are no organized groups of native americans fighting here but yet you see a tepee that's because this regiment is associated with tammany hall a political movement and they chose to put their political symbol chief tamanon on their regimental monument so we're going to get out here we'll talk about the high water mark the angle and pickett's charge and we'll see what we can do all right we have a lot to cover over here let's walk over this way so here is the clump of trees or the cups of trees it goes by both names these are the trees i pointed out earlier when we were over on the confederate line these are the trees that arguably general robert e lee's attack pickett's charge we're going to focus on we're not only at the clump of trees we're also at something called the high water mark of the confederacy or the high tide people like to say that you know after pickett's charge and after gettysburg the confederate tied seeded back back back until appomattox lastly we're also at a place called the angle do you see how that stone wall over there well trust me it goes over to that tree in the corner and then the wall angles back to the road and continues along the road okay the only reason we care about all that at all is that there are union troops on the road there are unit troops along that wall but there's no union troops along that wall it meant that you had disconnection between the union lines over here okay so let's walk out a little bit further and talk about some of this fighting because unlike today i already mentioned there's no wind here it is july 3rd 1863 at 1 pm people are thinking there's not going to be a battle today when suddenly two confederate canyons erupt from the southern line followed by 158 more the union responds with 55 70 85 100 cannons and for 90 minutes this is the largest bombardment ever heard upon this continent you could supposedly hear it 20 30 40 60 miles away and some places eight miles away couldn't hear it because of these acoustic shadows in any case because there was no wind the smoke just sat there and because the smoke just sat there no one could see what they were shooting at because of that and because of these arguably you know faulty confederate uh fuses the southern shells will fly largely over the union position harmlessly and because of that there are still at least 50 union cannon up here when the southerners make their attack but nonetheless they had brought a finite amount of ammunition with them it is time for the supreme effort and at around three o'clock p.m um in the afternoon of july third 1863 a great moan goes up from the union line because it was supposedly beautiful like a parade ground the way the southerners emerged from the distant woods and from uh you know the hollows in front of those woods it was beautiful and it was wide it was more than a mile wide you couldn't take the whole thing in okay and as they started marching this way and as the union started opening with long-range artillery fire they tore gaps into the confederate line and if this guy next to me gets shot i closed up i moved over and in that fashion the confederates are going to you know the confederate line is actually going to shrink as it reaches the emmitsburg road that's the road over there that you might be able to see you'll see a car once in a while and you might be able to see some rail fences over there okay now that road is angling away from us so this happened at different times but nonetheless around when the confederates reach the road a few things are happening one general mead now knows where the attack is coming and he orders 5 10 20 30 000 reinforcements toward the union center he is not taking any chances at all also the union line now advances and bulges out where vermont troops over there and ohio and new york troops over there will make a three-sided box and guess who's advancing into it the confederates okay also the southerners are now within rifle range so thousands of union soldiers rise up and begin to pepper the confederates with that rifle range nonetheless many of the southerners continue not ten thousand not even five thousand but a lot of them push beyond the emmitsburg road and make a bid to capture this position some of them push up into that area beyond the angle other virginians capture the stone wall down here it gets too intense for these pennsylvanians over there okay and some of the other pennsylvanians actually bent their line back into the clump of trees and continued to fight at the confederates now the reserve brigade under louis armistice comes up he puts his hat up on his sword and says follow me boys give him the cold steel in a bid to capture these cannons over here you see the cannons the cans are under the command of a guy named alonso cushing cushing is already holding back his insides from one wound while he's trying to give the command with another um the southerners roll over the wall the yankees break and begin to run at this point cushing falls dead and the southerners capture the guns they begin to swivel the cannons around and if you could stop time right there okay right there the southerners have achieved their objective they've captured the position they were assigned to capture okay they've cut the union army in two but time does not stand still and the first of the reinforcements begin to arrive some of the main and massachusetts soldiers over there begin to fight through the clump of trees and it is particularly intense foot to foot toe-to-toe man-to-man covered in sweat black with smoke red with blood they are fighting against each other here in the angle and it goes immediately from a moment of great promise for the confederates great promise to robert e lee's greatest defeat by far scarcely six thousand of the twelve thousand men who made this attack made it back to seminary ridge an hour later the union troops were chanting fredericksburg fredericksburg to say that they were getting the southerners back for the wholesale destruction they had received from them seven months earlier at fredericksburg the union captured 23 battle flags in this attack more than they'd captured the entire war up to that point combined they finally won and they won well now some people criticized george gordon mead for not counter-attacking okay because that's what you usually do right you follow up a retreating foe but why would mead want to attack across the same open fields he just slaughtered his enemy on i'm not sure plus you don't just get an attack moving just like that it would have taken a while and robert e lee is an extraordinarily dangerous opponent even after he's been bloodied so the following day lee sat over there and you might be able to see him all the way across the field him and mead still face each other you can see the virginia memorial over there he looks like a black dot on top of the pedestal and they are still over there and that robert e lee over there is still hoping that mead will attack on july 4th that he'll take the bait that there can be a fourth day and that meat lee can still even the odds but no mead does not take the bait that night lee goes back through the mountains nine days later he crosses back into virginia and this war goes on for two more years and at that point more people and by which i mean politicians criticized george gordon mead for not bagging the confederate army let me tell you you don't bag 50 000 men under robert e lee okay no one could even beat him before and then when somebody finally beats him that's not good enough you got to bag the whole thing and by the way when you have these new generals coming in the following year you're talking about grant sherman and sheridan you know it's not like grant could beat robert e lee once and bag him or twice it took him fighting every day for 10 months to beat robert e lee so the way this battle goes is actually where mead says well if i didn't do well enough i tender my resignation and lincoln says whoa it's not so bad lee tenders his resignation and i'm sure the confederate president davis was like yeah yeah like i'm gonna let you go both these guys went on to command until the end of the war but as i mentioned general grant ulysses s grant takes command of all the union armies later and he know how to end the war the worse this thing is the sooner this thing will be over and he pressed this for every day until he wore the south out until through a series of battles he was able to surround lee at appomattox and basically force him to surrender and the rest of the confederates surrendered at that point so was gettysburg the high water mark of the confederacy we'll let you figure that out um is gettysburg the turning point of the civil war i don't know i think there's at least 30 turning points of the civil war of which this is won and i wouldn't necessarily call it the most important but gettysburg is still the civil war battle that people know about it's the largest battle it was near population centers it was the first battlefield to be preserved thank you members of the american battlefield trust for continuing that work and abraham lincoln came here and delivered his gettysburg address and that is why gettysburg is sort of the mecca of civil war battlefields all right so you might get a better view here of george gordon mead or some of the other union monuments around here again union soldiers definitely wanted their monument near the angle where lee was finally and most decisively repulsed um ironically a lot of the final battling was done in the african-american section of town remember we're only eight miles north of the uh mason dixon line most of the african-american civilians here fled and got the world out of here because confederates were taking some not from gettysburg from some neighboring towns african-americans free people back into slavery one of the renters over here was abraham bryan and this is a brian house and likely the headquarters for a union general named hayes which is pretty interesting and now we're back almost where we first did our first video and i'm going to show you the last surviving civil war veteran although other people claim this honor he is the most verified one alfred wilson who died in 1956 and i believe he was 108 or 109 depending on which source you listen to and after that you know nobody could say they truly knew the civil war at all he was a bugler from minnesota although i'll say it wasn't that long ago and this is part of my job to do this i have been to about one-fifth of the battle of gettysburg anniversary i have met at least 100 people who shook the hand of civil war veterans it just wasn't that long ago and i think the better we can understand the people of the past by dragging the past forward or hitting people with the realization that it just wasn't all that long ago i think it'll help us understand the people of the past a little bit better they weren't in black and white their lives were diverse like ours and i think studying the past will teach us a little bit more about american history about the civil war and about the battle of gettysburg let's get out one last time and wrap this up we've come full circle we're in the soldiers national cemetery at gettysburg this is the first national cemetery established actually on a battlefield and one of the first of all the national cemeteries but before we talk about the dead we have to note that there were a lot of wounded there were a lot of missing there were a lot of captured so let's talk about the prisoners first if you were a prisoner and there were thousands on each side in the wake of this battle you would have been marched to the rear of the enemy army if you were a union prisoner they'd have moved you over to the mountains under a heavy guard and then a much lighter guard thereafter where you'd be less of a threat as you got into confederate territory you might march another 50 miles before you got to a rail head somewhere in the shenandoah valley maybe stanton virginia where by rail you might be shipped off to a southern prison at this time in the war you had an increasingly smaller likelihood of actually getting exchanged on either side prisons swelled on both sides and you could die of exposure and and freeze to death in the north or you could die of starvation or exposure in the south they were terrible places north and south in as far as the wounded goes you know luckily a lot of the wounded here on both sides uh you know had benefited from bitter experience from the first two years of the war and in the year before this one particular doctor named jonathan letterman laid out what is now our entire 9-1-1 system and our entire system of triage out on a four-page piece of paper and it really preserved life here at gettysburg where on both sides they started to establish division level hospitals for the union who stayed here they established a general hospital which no doubt preserved life as well but what we really think about are the roughly 10 000 soldiers who are actually killed or mortally wounded at the battle of gettysburg of which again more than 3 500 are buried here of which at least four or five thousand confederates were actually shipped uh south to southern cemeteries as unidentified groups of remains at that point and some of the other union soldiers were brought home by friends to other places in pennsylvania and in other states and we know we think that there are more remains on the battlefield but there is no active you know effort to try to locate them at this point and this really speaks toward this is why abraham lincoln spoke here it was in the center of the war he wanted to give a renewed purpose to the war so that these dead shall not have died in vain and he saw the future of this country and he saw the government of for and by the people you know would not perish from the earth and this is just one of the many reasons why it's important to come to gettysburg to visit american historic sites and again when you come here see the battlefield see it in whichever way you'd like and interact with that battlefield in the way that moves you the most and if you can get a licensed battlefield guide to take you around we really appreciate you coming with us on our video journey today thank you for coming with and thank you for supporting battlefield preservation

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 1,343,377

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, Gettysburg Battlefield Tour, Gettysburg Tour Video, Garry Adelman Gettysburg Tour, gettysburg driving tour

Id: NfjcMwhuiW0

Length: 124min 21sec (7461 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021