[Emailed June 30, 1997]

TRADGEDY AND DEFEAT

Still taking a break from the War....sort of.

I really didn't mean for it to go on this long (it's been a couple of weeks since I read anything Confederate), but I had the pleasant misfortune of picking up the first volume of C. S. Lewis's _Space Trilogy_ a week ago, and then I couldn't put it down until I finished it. *HIGHLY* recommended, even if you don't really like science fiction.

And, of course, I'm still reading _The Southern Tradition At Bay_ by Richard Weaver. It's definitely southern, but not the sort of work from which you relate stories via email (although it has a wealth of profound quotes).

Besides, this week isn't the time or place for pithy quotes or amusing stories. This week should be remember with more sober, more somber reflection. For this is the week , one hundred and thirty-four years ago, that marked the beginning of the end of the Confederacy.

This the week of Gettysburg.

This is the week when the hopes of the South were dashed. When the largest battle ever fought on American continent raged. When the soil of the Pennsylvania hills was darkened by the blood of thousands of brave Southern boys, far from home, fighting for their independence.

This is the week where the Confederates, without the benefit of Jeb Stuart's cavalry, blindly groped its way toward a small Pennsylvania town--looking for shoes--and stumbled into the Union army. This is the week when those same Confederates, on the first day of the contest, pushed the Yankees back, through the town, and might have routed them but for Lee's ambiguous orders to Ewell, and Ewell's fatal hesitancy. A fatal hesitancy that allowed the Union army to draw up on the high ground of cemetery ridge.

This is the week where, on the second day of the contest, the Confederates came close--oh so close--to turning the Union flank. Charge after charge, up the slopes of Little Round Top, attacking the extreme Yankee left. Where, at one point, some of the soldiers actually reached the top of the hill and looked down into the rear of the Yankee line, and then for lack of strength, had to retreat.

And finally, this is the week, on the third and last day of the battle, where fifteen thousand of the finest men the South could assemble massed under cover of the woods, lined up, looked across the mile-long field at the Federal position, and marched into history. This is the week where those men gave their utmost in the futile, fatal, desperate attempt to break the Union line--what we now have come to know as "Pickett's Charge."

Ladies and gentlemen, as you celebrate America's independence this week, remember that for the Southerner, it is a bittersweet celebration at best.