Copyright 1999 by the New York Times Co.
Reprinted by permission.
Editor's Note: This Op-Ed piece appeared in the Times May 30.

By Allen B. Ballard
Albany

It was Memorial Day weekend a year ago, and since I was deep in the writing of a novel about a black Civil War cavalryman, I decided to stop at Gettysburg on my way home from a college reunion. I had passed through the town several times before but had avoided the battlefield, put off not only by the commercial atmosphere of the town, but also by a feeling of emotional detachment from the battle, since no African-American soldiers had taken part in it.

Indeed, a company of black volunteers from Philadelphia who took the train to Harrisburg to fight the Southern invaders were turned back because of their color. But now I had read several tomes about Gettysburg and knew the major actors, the landscape and the stakes, and it was time to view the battle scene for myself.

Early Sunday afternoon I went to the visitors' center and watched the battle being played out on a huge floor map where lights depict the shifting positions of the Union and Confederate forces. I was the only black in the entire audience. A little later, I asked a black ticket taker at the huge sightseeing tower overlooking the battlefield how many African-Americans were among the passengers who went up in the elevator. "Very few," she said. "Ten or 15 a day."

At the top of the tower, buffeted by a heavy wind, I surveyed the battlefield through my binoculars. There, to my right, was the site of the farm that had belonged to a black man who fled with the coming of the Confederates, knowing that they were seizing free black people, shackling them together and selling them into slavery down South. Far in the distance was Little Round Top, the extreme left of the Union lines, where Col. Joshua Chamberlain made his now famous stand with the sturdy men of Maine. I decided to walk as much of the battlefield as possible.

I began with Cemetery Ridge, the site of Pickett's Charge, where on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, some 13,000 Southerners, flags flying, drums rolling, trumpets blowing, had marched up a softly sloping hill toward the waiting Yankee cannon. Half of them never made it back to their lines. The spot of their furthest advance is near a monument commemorating Brig. Gen. Lewis Armistead, who had placed a hat on the end of his sword — so that his Virginia lads could look up, see it and be emboldened — and shouted, "Come on, boys, give them the cold steel!" He was mortally wounded in the charge.

Had Armistead's admittedly brave men prevailed and the Union lines been broken, slavery might have been preserved in the South for generations. I gazed at his stone memorial and softly cursed his slavery-spreading soul. And for good measure, that of D. Wyatt Aiken, a South Carolina colonel who held my blacksmith ancestor in bondage and commanded one of the South Carolina regiments that had fought half a mile or so away from this spot on the previous day. Then I asked the good Lord to forgive me.

I passed monument after monument to troops from Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania. At each one, I glanced toward those fields and woods from which the Confederate regiments had come marching and blessed the Yankee mechanics, farm boys and clerks and the German, Polish and Irish immigrants who kept firing from their Springfields into the Rebel ranks. Few of the Union men had any particular love for black people, but most recognized a curse on the land and their own futures when they saw one.

Enveloped now in the aura that hovers over this battlefield, I finally stood on the crest of Little Round Top, just about where Col. Chamberlain's men had been before they charged down on the Confederates with fixed bayonets and routed them, saving the day and probably the battle for the North. Below me were the huge boulders from behind which the Confederates had advanced, the gray and butternut uniforms emerging from the gray of the rocks.

The sun was getting low. I took one last look around. Two rebel soldiers sat on a rock behind me, knees curled up between their arms. They were only reenactors. But how dared they! They were telling the tourists that they were from the "Valley," Stonewall Jackson's stomping grounds down on the Shenandoah. We sized each other up, the Rebs and I.

Their look wasn't hostile, but buddylike — hey, we're all up here on the Round Top together. I wanted to scream at them. Instead, I turned away and began the long march back along Cemetery Ridge toward the statue of Gen. George Meade, the commanding officer of the Union forces. I took a photo of him and then stood looking out over the field.

Abe Lincoln, the man of sorrow and reconciliation, had stood nearby, eulogizing the Union dead and charging the living to rededicate themselves to the eternal principles of justice and equality. What would that great soul think of us now? And just how came it to be that all these years later and in the sixth decade of my life, I — born in nearby Philadelphia, the descendant of leaders of the Underground Railroad, runaway Maryland slaves and a black veteran of Valley Forge — still felt like an uninvited guest at this spot? Hadn't the Park Service set up a special exhibit in the visitors' center on the role of African-American troops in the Civil War, and wasn't everyone here overflowing with courtesy toward me?

There was a red tinge in the rapidly darkening sky. I was the last person on the battlefield — except, faintly, I heard — an unmistakable tune. Someone was whistling "Dixie" right there in the middle of the Union lines. I saw him, a thin man in a short-sleeved shirt, about 30, coming toward me with a woman on his arm. I stood at full height looking over the battlefield, arms folded. Would he have the nerve to go by me whistling that song? And what would I do if he did?

He was about 25 yards away from me, still whistling, but more softly, and then he fell silent. They must be directly behind me. I let my breath out but didn't budge. A minute, two minutes, and then he started up again: "Away, away!"

I turned and headed home, determined that on this day and in this place, I would not let the sun go down on my wrath.

Allen B. Ballard, a history professor at the New York State University at Albany, is the author of a forthcoming novel on the Civil War.

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