Dave Brown, Citizen Special
One needs a guide if ghost hunting in a place like this; somebody who can pick a clear target out of the tens of thousands who took part in the battle in 1863 that shaped the world we know today.
He is Ted Gajewski, retired steelworker and licenced battlefield guide, and a man who shares my passion for ghost hunting. He feels them. He tears up more than once as he tells of the epic three-day battle that was the beginning of the end for the dream of a Confederate States of America. For $55, he spends two hours giving a one-on-one tour of the huge battlefield site.
Example. He produces a ball of iron the size of a golf ball and explains it's a shot from a canister; a cannon shell much like a big shotgun shell. "They were fighting a war with old tactics against new technology," says Ted. "Imagine marching line abreast, shoulder-to-shoulder, standing upright, against a weapon like this -- deadly at 400 yards."
cannister shot is an airborne meat grinder. At the same time, cannon balls are ripping into the line, tearing off limbs, and musket shot is searching for vital spots. "If you were a Union soldier behind this wall of stones, you'd be able to hear the Confederate officers ordering men to fill gaps in the line where men had been mowed down. And still they kept coming.
"It was rich man's war, a poor man's fight, and a young man's death. The average age of soldiers was 18. (Both sides took recruits as young as 14.) The battle here wasn't planned. It was an accident."
Both the South's Gen. Robert E. Lee and the North's Gen. George Meade had advised their officers they didn't want a fight at Gettysburg, and each was at least 16 kilometres away when the clash started July 1. Eight roads crossed at Gettysburg and with two armies loose in the area, it was only a matter of time before they clashed. The rebel army was in the area north of Washington in an attempt to move the battle out of North Carolina to give farmers there a chance to re-provision the south. That they planned to raid shoe factories is a legend that doesn't hold up to records, said the guide. "There were no shoe factories in the area until decades later."
Once the fighting started, both generals had no choice but to throw everything they had into it. Three days later, 13,000 Americans were dead and tens of thousands wounded. (In the Civil War 622,000 American soldiers were killed, more than 200,000 more than in the Second World War.) The defeated rebels loaded their wounded into wagons on the fourth day, and headed south down the Taneytown Road. The wagon train of wounded was 27 kilometres long. The seriously wounded were left behind.
Gen. Meade also left his wounded behind to chase the defeated army. That left Gettysburg, population 2,400, with 22,000 wounded to care for, and no hospitals. There were 6,000 dead horses and mules beginning to rot. They had to be burned. Identity tags had not yet been invented, and the dead from both sides, 13,000, were buried in pits.
Asked to single out a ghost, Ted Gajewski gives me Northern Gen. Daniel Edgar Stickles.
He was the only general in the battle who had no military training. He was a lawyer-politician who used his clout to get a commission. At the battle he was assigned to hold the high ground, but feared he would find no glory on the hill, so disobeyed the order. He moved his troops down for a fight, in which he lost most of his men and one of his legs.
The leg was taken off July 2, but opportunist that he was, he made it to Washington, about 160 kilometres away, on July 4 to deliver the news of the victory, pump up his role in it, and trash-talk Gen. Meade. He waved his wound as proof of his heroism. He donated the amputated leg to a medical museum, and today it's still part of a collection that includes the vertebrae of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.
Pre-Gettysburg, in 1859, hearing that his wife was having an affair, he shot and killed her lover, Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key, author of The Star Spangled Banner. Charged with murder, he became the first American to beat a murder charge by pleading temporary insanity. He then wormed his way into a uniform, and it was said he ran a headquarters as a cross between a tavern and a brothel.
He became the only American to award himself the Medal of Honor. Thirty-four years after Gettysburg, he was instrumental in setting up the battlefield commission that created the memorial park. He included conditions. One was that he be awarded the medal, and another was that a monument to himself be built on the site. He got the medal, but the funds needed to complete the monument were stolen before it was finished. It is believed that money wound up in Stickles' pockets.
His postwar career included an appointment as a U.S. representative to Spain, where he made sexual advances on the queen, getting his one-legged butt hurriedly shipped home. In another scandal, he hooked up with a known prostitute named Fanny White, and took her with him to England where he used his credentials to arrange an introduction of Fanny to Queen Victoria. He didn't use her real last name, but that of one of his political opponents.
He lived long and hard, dying in 1914 at age 95.
My day ended by driving to Taneytown along the road Gen. Lee's wagons of wounded used. There was a freshly purchased compact disc in the player, pumping out over and over -- Dixie. Ghosts were out in force.
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/col ... 166116&p=2
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