Gettysburg

This board holds the pictures gathered for Gettysburg, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Few places in America have been photographed, painted and remembered as often as this small Pennsylvania town.

The battle was fought over 3 days, July 1 to 3, 1863. Robert E. Lee's Confederate army had marched north into Pennsylvania, and it met the Union army under George Meade at the crossroads town of Gettysburg. The fighting ended with Pickett's Charge, a massed Confederate assault across open fields that failed with terrible losses. Lee retreated to Virginia, and he never again invaded the North. Casualties on both sides together are usually estimated at around 50,000 killed, wounded, captured or missing.

Photographers arrived within days. Alexander Gardner and his assistant Timothy O'Sullivan photographed the dead where they lay, before burial crews reached them. These were among the first pictures to show Americans the reality of a battlefield. Historians later found that at least one famous scene, a dead soldier at a stone wall in Devil's Den, had been arranged by moving the body for a better picture.

In November 1863 President Abraham Lincoln came to dedicate a cemetery for the Union dead. The main speaker, Edward Everett, spoke for about 2 hours. Lincoln then spoke for about 2 minutes. His Gettysburg Address runs about 270 words, and it became one of the most famous speeches in the English language. Only a few photographs from that day are known, and Lincoln himself is hard to find in them.

Gettysburg also became a place of memory. Veterans returned for reunions, most famously in 1913 for the 50th anniversary, when thousands of aging Union and Confederate soldiers camped together on the field. Monuments went up by the hundreds. Look at how the same fields appear in pictures taken decades apart, from scenes of destruction to quiet parkland.