When I took a trip with my father to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 2002, American ethos was still simmering. The nation’s emotional wounds had not yet begun to heal seven months after the unimaginable attack on Sept. 11, 2021.
Our visit to the hollowed Civil War landmark was many years in the making—my dad’s affinity for war history rubbed off on me. Both touring the sacred battlefield and encountering visceral reminders of 9/11 along that journey to get to it has remained.
Like a combined allegory, the battle’s historical consequences and terrorism’s contemporaneous alarms converged to carve a personal impression. The first, walking the grounds of where there was the bloody fight to gain freedom cruelly denied for a group of people, and secondly, our country’s battle 138 years later to defend that same precious value from tyranny.
I remember then realizing the significance of both Gettysburg and stringent law-enforcement measures, particularly in airports, because of terrorism reverberations. Both were bookends, in my mind, to what is essentially America stripped down to its core, which I believe holds true today.
As our nation embarks on its 250th anniversary, the wide range of iconic patriotic symbols, flawed leaders, sites, events and battles like D-Day will be appropriately highlighted and celebrated. No doubt there will be heightened patriotic, firework-laden celebrations.
Because of this year’s big birthday, our nation’s altruistic idealism and protean moral position in history, its imperfections and global significance are likely to be probed. And with that, questions of what America—still an experiment—really means will stir healthy conversations.
So what does America mean? What’s our fundamental identity? The answers can be subjective and complex as there are citizens.
At Gettysburg a visitor can travel up the 650-foot-high bald mountain called Little Round Top, the pivotal high ground paramount for that battle’s victory, ultimately secured by Union soldiers with desperate use of bayonets. It’s there in a narrow rocky space that the 20th Maine Division led by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain—resembling the raised arms of Moses during the Israelite’s epic battle in the wilderness—heroically blocked the Confederates repeatedly from flanking their superior position.
Historian and Mississippi-native Shelby Foote called it the “horrible little fight in a large battle.” Some scholars contend that if Chamberlain lost that high ground, the battle’s outcome, and perhaps the Civil War, takes an entirely different turn.
Below the mountain, you can stand next to a picket fence where soldiers marched for two hours in deathly futility across an ascending 20-acre wheat field. At the cemetery, you can hear the park ranger talk about ghosts of soldiers amidst 7,000 tombstones and you can step near the tree where President Lincoln gave his two-minute, Shakespearean address.
The Battle of Gettysburg, from July 1-3, 1863, yielded over 51,000 casualties, while the War Between the States saw over 620,000 deaths. Almost 3,000 people were killed on the morning of 9/11. The two events crippled a nation, then strengthened and united it both by military sacrifices and spirited resolve.
It’s hard for those who were alive to forget the despair and anguish of 9/11, and it’s hard to forget the sensations of visiting Gettysburg where I don’t remember feeling necessarily glorious fervor nor impressions of good versus evil. But the intense solemnity of the battlefield is striking as is Ground Zero, which I later visited.
If America is about both the continual chase of freedom and simultaneous defense of it—both are messy, complicated ventures—I think Manhattan’s WTC Memorial and Gettysburg could be considered the proposition’s two-sided poster. With both tributes, trajectories hold corollary implications: Established liberty should be preserved farther than a soldier’s cannon fire and nobly pursued higher than any soaring plane.
The skyscrapers, it seems, point upward to the freedom America aspires to unceasingly chase—whether that format is in the courts and voting booths, religion, culture, technology or God forbid, wars—while a panoramic view from a Pennsylvania summit is a reminder of the wide stretch of liberty America has scaled at tremendous, non-linear sacrifice.
Both poles symbolize the slow-moving, rigorous progress that our nation has advanced and simultaneously into the horizon ahead where humanity furiously demands, through arduous trial and error, we perservere—or more aptly, “To form a more perfect union.”
For our young City on the Hill, may freedom continue to valiantly and loudly ring true in both directions.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
