Gettysburg, PA 6/16/14

We drove to Gettysburg to tour the museum and battlefield.  We viewed a cyclorama titled The Battle of Gettysburg, an oil painting 42 feet high, 377 feet long and weighing 12.5 tons painted by Paul Philippoteaux in 1883.  Cycloramas were a very popular form of entertainment in the 1800s.  Following are details from that painting.

 

The museum exhibits artifacts not only from Gettysburg, but from the Civil War era.

If you think our congress is rife with conflict: in the old Senate chamber in Washington, DC...

in May, 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks, offended by a speech given by Senator Charles Sumner opposing slavery, walked into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner unconscious with his cane.

 

Back home women scraped lint from linen, twisted it into bundles and sent it to army hospitals where doctors used damp lint to cover wounds.



 

Winslow Homer painted this sharpshooter in 1862 when he was a battlefield artist for Harper's Weekly.

 



 

A Camp and Outpost Manual for Infantry published by Harper and Row in 1863.

 

A sketch by Edwin Forbes titled Geary's Brigade--Culp's Hill, July 3, 1863, drawn during the battle and published in Century Magazine.

 

 



A few days before the Battle of Gettysburg, George Armstrong Custer (left) posed with a Union cavalry general.  Custer would build his military career on the bravado he displayed in this and other battles.  As a result, years later he would lead U.S. forces in his final campaign at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

 

A lancet and scarificator used by some battlefield surgeons to bleed patients.

 



A tenaculum used by surgeons to hook and hold onto severed or displaced blood vessels while another surgeon tied them off to control bleeding.

 

As commander-in-chief, Lincoln could and did intervene when deserters were sentenced to death, as in the case of Alanson Orton.  As a result, Orton lived until 1907.



 



 

McPherson's ridge was the scene of the first battle of Gettysburg.  Much of the fighting took place around McPherson's barn.

 

 

 

Union forces were driven back from "Devil's Den," the rocky area in the upper left, to the ridge from which we took this photograph.

 

The 24-mile road through the Gettysburg battlefield is lined with monuments and memorials placed there by Civil War vets and by cities and states to honor the vets.

 

This photo is taken from the Union position on Cemetery ridge where General Lee's miscalculation ended the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.

 





 

The field below Cemetery ridge where 1100 Confederate soldiers lost their lives during Pickett's charge.

 



 

A sketch by Edwin Forbes of the assault on Cemetery Hill.  Union forces are in front of the cemetery gatehouse.

 





 

Four days after the battle ended, Timothy O'Sullivan took a photograph of the battered cemetery gatehouse.

 



The gatehouse today.