I stood where he lay.  I was alive; he was dead.  We were separated by 140-years.  I don’t know who he was, and he would never have the opportunity to know me.  Even if he had lived, he would have been long dead by this time.  It was quiet at that place.  I stood there for some time by myself.  The rest of my group had wandered up the hill.  Other folks milled around the area, but not at that place.  Eventually, someone came back to check on me, and I got them to snap the photograph.

Many folks consider me a little weird to spend my vacation wandering through an old battlefield.  Perhaps they are right.  However, when you become possessed by the sense of history it becomes more than words and dates on a page.  There is a dynamic to history.  Although it is long past, somehow it speaks.  It seeks to tell you how it was and teach you its lessons.  Many wise men have professed that we seldom learn from history but are plagued to repeat it, even in its vilest forms.

And, so it was at Gettysburg.  Brother fought against brother.  Both sides sincerely believing they were fighting for their way of life.  Neither side was comprised of evil men.  The young men of the South bled by the tens of thousands for their homes.  Very few of them ever owned a slave.  In fact, it was not for slavery that they fought.  Perhaps that was the political terms the leaders who pulled them into the conflict claimed.  But, the Johnny Rebs were fighting for their homes, their way of life.  Perhaps they were delusional.  That really doesn’t matter now, they died just the same—258,000 by the time the conflict was over.  The young men of the North, who were fighting for the right for men to be free, numbered 360,000 dead.  During the three days of fighting in the Battle of Gettysburg alone, 8,000 from both sides died and 27,000 were wounded.

Before I left to visit the battlefields of Virginia and Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, I read voraciously about the battles.  Being a student of the American Civil War, I have many volumes to study.  Among those volumes is a presentation of the Civil War in photographs.  This was the age of the birth of the portable camera.  The revolution in processing permitted the photographer to leave the confines of his studio and roam the reaches of the wide open spaces in search of subjects.  This revolution in photography chronicled, for the first time, the horrors and reality of war.  It was while I was studying these photographs of Gettysburg that I ran upon the shot of a young soldier killed at Gettysburg--at a place called Devils Den to be precise.  That photograph burned its place in my memory.

And so, it was startling when I walked upon that place at Gettysburg.  I was alone and for an instant could hear the shooting and the shouting.  I could feel the heat of the battle and smell the aroma of fear and death.  As I walked to the place where the young soldier fell, I was struck with the specialness of the moment.  This was hallowed ground.  Not for just this young man but for a nation.  The urgent cries of history and the presumptuousness of the living echoed among those ancient boulders.  Have we learned anything in 140 years.  Who knows?  I like to think we have.