These Honored Dead

The ghosts of the past come back to haunt us. In "These Honored Dead," Thomas Desjardin mines the literature of the Battle of Gettysburg to demythologize the bloodiest, and most famous, battle of the Civil War. He sifts through letters, diaries, memoirs and other works of war literature to decipher the hidden meanings. Along the way, he contributes to what Gary Gallagher termed the "war of words."

The many legends about Gettysburg have helped to elevate it to a mythical place in literary history, associated with the greatest battles and leaders like Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great. As one veteran said, "our men made a charge that will be the theme of the poet, painter and historian of all ages." Veterans contextualized their experiences at Gettysburg with "the great literary works of history, quoting Victor Hugo, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, or the Bible."

The Epic Struggle

The battle was written into literary history as an epic struggle between two opposing forces, even though many of the details of the battle are hotly debated. One newspaper even reported, "Did you know that the greatest and bloodiest battle of the Civil War was fought over shoes?" Whatever the initial flashpoint of the battle, the myths have helped to create meaning for the participants.

"After the fight is over," John Singleton Mosby said, "they invent some fanciful theory on which they imagine that they fought." In the "war of words," the story continually evolves. According to Desjardin, "The popularity of Gettysburg as a subject for veterans to write about created a huge body of literature on the battle."

More than a simple retelling of the events, the literature about the Battle of Gettysburg constructed and then re-imagined the stories of that famous battle into what the writers "considered it ought to have been," according to Historian Marc Bloch. "If Americans have used the story of Gettysburg to elevate their sense of place in the world to that of other nations and empires, then they have also used it to find or construct their legendary heroes in the same fashion."

Fictionalization

The fictions of the past become a part of our history. As Stephen Vincent Benet once wrote, "It always seems to me that legends and yarns and folk tales are as much a part of the real history of a country as proclamations, provisos, and constitutional amendments." The myths about the Civil War--and particularly about the Battle of Gettysburg--have become entrenched in our culture. We tell and re-tell the stories, because the world still remembers what was done there on that battlefield. More than that, the world remembers what was said there by Abraham Lincoln, and by all the other writers who brought the struggles on that field to life--through the power of the pen.