It All Depends on Where You Stand (2024)

Many years ago, my late mentor, Dave Bruce, and I were discussing some aspects of 19^th century revivalism. After a while, a bit frustrated by his responses, I asked, “so what is a revival.” His answer was simple “well it all depends on where you stand.”

That admonition opened my eyes to a very different way to do history. Rather than look for an “answer”, Dave challenged me to account for multiple perspectives, to see things through many different eyes, and to always be mindful that where you stand shapes what you know. Dave’s advice stuck with me.

Though seemingly a simple exercise, taking such a view of history is extraordinarily difficult. Such a view invites you to embrace complexity, highlight subjectivity, and come to grips with the truth that there are many answers to a single question.

I spend a lot of time on the Gettysburg battlefield. I walk along Seminary Ridge every day. My youngest daughter and I drive the tour route nearly every evening – chatting about this and that as we wind our way across the battle lines. Sometimes, it seems like every bit of the battlefield has long become familiar.

The view from my daily battlefield walk (thanks to my little, barky dog Bailey for dragging me out here several times a day)

At the same time, though, there are many things left to learn from this place. It all depends on what you choose to see, and which voices you choose to listen to. Indeed, the battlefield itself – as an artifact – continues to yield new views and new ways to think about what happened here in 1863 and the contingency on which hangs every aspect of the human experience.

One of my favorite places to do this – to interrupt a linear narrative of the battle that starts with Willoughby’s Run, moves on to Little Round Top, and ends at the Clump of Trees – is near a cluster of “witness trees” just a little north of the North Carolina Memorial. If you stand there and ask what happened under these trees, you get a new view on the battle and gain a bit of insight into how the battle unfolded.

On the morning of July 1, soldiers from the famous Iron Brigade marched across this ground. Later that day, troopers from Devin’s cavalry brigade fought a final delaying action within view. Not long after, Confederate infantry soldiers arrived and took up a position just behind the ridge. Across the way, Union forces began to create their famous line along Cemetery Ridge. And while all this happened, Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet conducted a personal reconnaissance of the ground and began the conversation about what would come next. And that is just what unfolded on July 1.

If you had been able to just stand right here between July 1 and July 3 you would have seen a tremendous lot.

But there are other, and more profoundly significant ways to gain new views onto the Battle of Gettysburg and its continuing power to help us see the Civil War and our own times in different way. Getting at these questions, though, takes a little bit of work. The yield, however, is great and provides important correctives to storytelling that focuses purely on military history. From the perspective of the town’s civilians, the violence that engulfed their town was unexpected, unwelcome, and life changing. The story of 16-year-old Amelia Harmon and her aunt Rachel is only one of many that help us begin to understand the battle in a fuller way and introduces new characters to the story of the battle.

In 1863, the two women lived in the large brick mansion built by Emmanuel Harmon. The house sat between Herr’s Ridge and McPherson’s Ridge near a small stream called Willoughby’s Run. In the waning days of June, rumors swirled through Franklin and Adams Counties that the rebel invaders were stealing horses and other livestock. The two male farmhands who worked for Emmanuel Harmon took the farm’s horses into the countryside to hide.

Willougby’s Run which marked the eastern edge of the Harmon Farm and where the skirmish near Marsh Creek became The Battle of Gettysburg

The women had no doubt watched warily as Jubal Early’s Division marched past the farm on June 27 and heard rumors about the demands for supplies Early had made of the borough leaders. Their concern must have risen again on June 30 when Confederate troops under Johnston Pettigrew marched into town. Perhaps they felt relief when the same gray clad soldiers marched back westward in the afternoon. But the arrival of John Buford’s cavalrymen in the evening – with some trotting westward toward Cashtown and others gathering along the ridges near the Lutheran Seminary - likely jangled their nerves. The night of June 30 around Gettysburg was electrically tense.

Early the next morning Amelia was startled by the crackle of gunfire off to the west. Though she and her aunt continued to hope for the best, they comforted themselves with the thought that if worse came to worse the mansion’s 18” thick wall would provide a bit of safety. Before long, the sound of booming cannon announced a rising fight. By 8:30 the rattle of Union cavalrymen’s carbines and heavier report of Confederate infantrymen’s rifle muskets was coming closer.

Like many other Gettysburg residents, curiosity at first overtook fear early that morning. Instead of seeking cover in the basem*nt, Amelia and Rachel, watched from a second story window. Union soldiers shouted at them to find a safe place. Instead, the pair climbed the stairs to the cupola on the top of the house to get a better view. Amelia recalled, “[h]orses and men were falling under our eyes by shots from an unseen foe, and the confusion became greater every minute…we did not know it then, but [we] were in the very center of the first shock of battle between (Confederate Gen. A. P.) Hill’s forces and the advance line of (Union Gen. John) Buford’s cavalry.”

Through the morning vicious fighting swept across the Harmon farm. But around 9:30 or 10:00, the troops on both sides drew back and a tense quiet fell over the Harmon farm. But not for long. Amelia recalled that fighting – this time by skirmishers -- broke out in late morning. A detachment of men from the 80^th New York Infantry rushed forward with thoughts of using the Harmon house as a sharpshooter’s position. They banged on the door and demanded entrance. Though Amelia and her aunt protested, the blue clad soldiers persisted. The terrified women took shelter in the basem*nt while the New Yorkers went to work firing from the windows of the stout brick house.

The men of the 80^th stayed only a while. Confederate troops, now reinforced, began a major assault mid-afternoon. As the Empire State troops fled, Amelia and her aunt, still huddled in the basem*nt, heard hundreds of marching feet. Peering through a small window, all the terrified women could see were the gray clad legs of passing Confederates.

While the lines of infantry swept forward, several rebels banged on the door of the Harmon house. When Amelia and Rachel answered they saw the barn and other outbuilding afire. The soldiers, under orders to also burn the house, told the Harmon women to leave. Though they begged that the house be spared, the Confederate persisted and soon the two women were scrambling westward, toward the rebel lines, and up Herr’s Ridge amidst a hail of bullets and artillery shells. As they glanced over their shoulders, they could see their house engulfed in flames.

Others saw similar views unfold as homes were burned, shattered by shells, punctured by bullets wherever the armies were. And all – in the wake of the armies who moved on for the next round of organized mass murder -- experienced the foul water, the putrid air, the throbbing agony of maimed and wounded me lying in homes, churches, and schools. They drank water polluted by dead horses and men. War had swept them all up in a horror they had hoped would never come. But it did. The community scared and traumatized tried to move on but for those ordinary people who lived in an ordinary town in south central Pennsylvania life would never be the same.

There is another story, a different perspective that deserves its own space. The Black men and women who lived in Franklin and Adams Counties lived a different kind of hell and experienced a different kind of terror. Their story will be the topic of the next installment.