Transforming heritage discourse on the landscape at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

The history of Gettysburg’s ‘sacred’ landscape

Several scholars have examined connections between sacredness and the American Civil War in general, and Gettysburg in particular.⁴ The term ‘sacred’ is often popularly applied to the 2,441 hectares of Gettysburg National Military Park (GNMP), the official name – an odd marriage of the terms ‘military’ and ‘park’ – of the battlefield’s preserved sections.⁵ GNMP is one of nine national military parks under the aegis of the National Park Service (NPS), a federal agency that is in turn part of the Department of the Interior. In 2011, then Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, announcing the acquisition of 95 acres that had previously been owned by a private club and lay adjacent to the preserved sections of the battlefield, said that ‘Gettysburg will always have a sacred place in America’s heritage’. The National Cemetery, which is part of GNMP and lies atop Cemetery Hill, the primary objective of Confederate forces during the battle, is unsurprisingly popularly described as sacred. In January 2024, GNMP hosted a winter lecture entitled ‘The Heavens Meet Earth at Gettysburg: The Design of Sacred Spaces’, described as an examination of ‘how Gettysburg battlefield monuments and their landscaped spaces formed a sacred bridge between the battlefield and otherworldly places’. The Gettysburg Foundation, a private organisation that fundraises for GNMP, hosts an annual series of free, well-attended public lectures at the main museum for the battle, surrounded by the battlefield, during the battle’s anniversary in July entitled Sacred Trust Talks.⁶

Time and place merged to deem certain portions of Gettysburg’s landscape as sacred and iconic owing to fighting that was particularly vicious and bloody, even by the standards of the three-day battle. Though many of the swales and ridges had been adapted and changed by farmers for at least 80 years prior to the battle, and by Native Americans for centuries prior to white appropriation of the land, anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours of fighting over a few acres could freeze that portion of the land in time from July 1863 until the present. White Gettysburg native David McConaughy, one of the first people to push for preservation and a founder of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association (GBMA), started raising funds less than six weeks after the battle, calling for the purchase and protection of the battlefield so that ‘its natural and artificial defences [be] preserved and perpetuated in the exact form and condition they presented during the battle’.⁷ His successful efforts eventually meant that places like a small peach orchard that endured about two hours of fighting and which, before the battle, was simply a peach orchard, became the Peach Orchard. Becoming the focus of battle for a slice of time that was minuscule relative to the land’s long, long history, froze locations in time: the Wheatfield, the Railroad Cut, the Angle, Devil’s Den, the High Water Mark, the Copse of Trees and others. They became sacred and iconic.

The lasting perception of and persistent references to the battlefield at Gettysburg as sacred elide two key questions: sacred to whom? And not sacred to whom?

One Black man’s story about the Copse of Trees suggests some answers. About 17 years after the battle, Basil Biggs, a Black resident of Gettysburg whose earnings from disinterring soldiers’ bodies in the weeks after the battle helped fund his purchase of a farm on the southern part of the battlefield, was spending an afternoon cutting down trees on his land so that he could make money by converting them into fence rails. A white man, John Bachelder, who arguably deserves the most credit for what the battlefield landscape became, happened upon Biggs’s violation of the sacred. Bachelder, trying to get Biggs to stop chopping more trees down, said, ‘I expostulated with him’ by explaining the tremendous historic value of this small stand of woods. During the battle, the Confederate Army had used the trees as a sighting landmark for thousands of soldiers as they coordinated a mile-long advance over fields and fences amid the violent chaos of Pickett’s Charge, the final explosive attempt of the Confederate forces to break through Union lines. The Copse stands next to the High Water Mark, which is the best approximation of the furthest point Confederate soldiers reached before they were finally driven back and forced to retreat. The Copse, then, also became a sighting device for how many Americans think of Gettysburg’s location in the great sweep of American history: for northerners it was when and where the Union cause was won, saving the country through the steadfast determination of their soldiers; for white southerners it became an almost chimerical place and moment that could have made the decades that followed so different, when and where their noble cause was almost won as a result of the gallantry of their soldiers’ sacrifice. The Copse became sacred.

For white Americans. For Basil Biggs, the Copse of Trees was a copse of profit. Only after it dawned on Bachelder that the iconic status of the trees meant nothing to this Black man, whose past and present experience of America was very different than his, was he able to convince Biggs to stop cutting the trees down. Bachelder, realising he had to appeal to a completely different sensibility, told Biggs that ‘if he cut them, then he was only getting for them their value as rails, whereas, if he allowed them to stand to mark the spot he would eventually get ten times as much for them’. Biggs stopped and sold the Copse to Bachelder’s GBMA along with seven other adjoining acres, which would become Hancock Avenue and which remains one of the most heavily travelled roads in the park, for over $1,200 – a substantial sum at the time.⁸

Figure 1 and Figure 2 track how the Copse of Trees and the High Water Mark were simultaneously frozen in time and developed, protecting the site while also making it more accessible to visitors. Monuments were erected and relocated, cannons inserted and/or taken away, roads improved and a fence erected around the trees.

Figure 1

The Highwater Mark, 1886–1910. Image A, 1886: ‘Highwater Mark, showing the monuments of the 72nd and 106 Penna Volunteers. Gettysburg, Pa.’ Note the dirt road. A fence would be installed around the Copse of Trees, immediately to the left of the 106th Pennsylvania monument, the following year. Two years later, the 106th monument would be moved about 0.2 miles to the south-west, to where that regiment fought on 2 July. In 1889 a new monument to the 106th would be installed near the Copse. Image B, 1903: From a stereograph with the Copse of Trees on the right, just past where Hancock Avenue curves to the right. Note the road had become paved. Image C, c. 1909: The High Water Mark memorial is the bronze open book immediately in front of the Copse of Trees. The 106th PA monument has been relocated. Note the additions of fence and curb.⁹ 

Figure 2

The High Water Mark, 1954–2025. Image D, c. 1954–70: Postcard ‘High Water Mark of the Rebellion, Gettysburg, Pa.’ This and similar postcards circulated from the 1920s. Image E, 26 April 2025: High Water Mark. The second 106th PA monument is immediately to the right. Also note that a paved walking path has been installed and Hancock Avenue has been widened.¹⁰ 

Rhetoric, race and the shaping of public memory

Today, GNMP is an odd blend of the ordinary and extraordinary.¹¹ Many of the fences, stone walls, woods, boulders and farmers’ fields that thousands of soldiers scrambled through, over and around remain, either because they have been guardedly undisturbed for over 160 years or because they have been restored and recreated. For the few thousand local residents who walk or cycle through the park on a regular basis, it can be a soothing, bucolic experience – so long as they let the stories standing behind the hundreds of monuments, and the monuments themselves, fade into a kind of visual white noise. What is seen gradually becomes unseen. For the hundreds of thousands of visitors who come for the explicit purpose of learning about those stories, the seen – the monuments – hides other stories behind a veil of sacredness.

The questions of perspective – to whom was the battlefield land sacred and to whom was it not? – are rarely asked. Landscape architect Reuben M. Rainey has pointed to the detailed, purposeful design of Union monuments that helped transform Gettysburg battlefields into ‘sacred precincts’. The time it took to do so far outstripped the time it took soldiers to kill each other during the battle. Rainey, focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notes that ‘the making of these monuments and the rituals of their dedication are essential to our understanding of what the Gettysburg landscape meant to nineteenth-century Americans’. As Union monuments were being crafted, situated and dedicated with great deliberation, specification and commemoration, the landscape was simultaneously being designed and modernised to increase accessibility so that more Americans could be shaped by its stories – though not by the stories that white veterans and preservationists ignored or forgot.¹²

The design choices and dedication speeches by veterans and their supporters merged with a rhetoric of white supremacy that permeated the United States during and after the war. Today, many Americans associate white supremacy only with extreme racists. When thinking of the past, some Americans might associate white supremacy with only a few specific aspects of the Confederacy, such as slavery. What gets missed in today’s popular association is that white supremacy, when defined as an acceptance and endorsement of the notion that the United States existed primarily because of and for white people, was an unquestioned part of the fabric of American culture, politics and economics for the vast majority of nineteenth-century white Americans. White supremacy was like breathing: they did not think about it; they just did it.

It is unsurprising, then, that Union commemorations reinforced white supremacy in multiple ways. They scrubbed the landscape clear of Blackness. They presumed, like Bachelder initially did, that all Americans would understand that white soldiers’ sacrifice sacralised Gettysburg’s landscape. The ‘creation of [Gettysburg’s] vast landscape as a monument was unprecedented in American history’, setting the template for many others over the next century for shaping public memory. That template ‘understood these monuments to be a celebration of the common citizen soldier who was the bulwark of American democracy’. And that common citizen soldier and the democracy they represented, in the collective imagination of both veterans and civilians, was white.¹³

The over 1,300 monuments and markers that now blanket the fields and line the roads of GNMP began shaping public memory even before the American Civil War ended in 1865. White civilians and white soldiers from the winning side initially intended that the landscape surrounding the town would commemorate a decisive victory by the northern states’ 90,000 soldiers. David McConaughy, in the same letter in which he called for preservation of the battlefield in its exact form over the three days of battle, described the landscape as a place in which ‘there could be no more fitting and expressive memorial of the heroic valor and signal triumph of our Army … than the battlefield itself’.¹⁴ Public commemoration of the Confederacy’s 70,000 soldiers from the slave-holding southern states played no part in those initial plans. Therefore, by the late 1880s, hundreds of Union monuments dotted the landscape, while only one small Confederate monument had been erected.

Designing a landscape that reified whiteness and silenced Blackness required enhanced access to thoughtful and deliberate monuments. Plans for constructing roads began at least by 1866. McConaughy and the GBMA wanted ‘to open a broad avenue along the main lines of battle’, envisioning a landscape filled with monuments, making Gettysburg an accessible ‘Mecca of the American patriot’.¹⁵ The unspoken, widely accepted premise from those early years of preservation into at least the 1890s, was that the patriot was white, male and supported the Union cause. While some maps made by Union officers who had fought at Gettysburg, such as those overseen by General Gouverneur Warren from 1868 to 1876,¹⁶ included detailed information about Confederate regiments, brigades and divisions, other maps, made or used collaboratively by the federal government and the GBMA in 1889 and 1890 for the purpose of designing the battlefield (see Figure 3 and Figure 4), often had little or no references to Confederate forces on the landscape. Given that other maps did include Confederate information, it seems unlikely that this omission was simply an oversight.

Figure 3

Map of the Office of Department of Quartermaster, Washington, DC, 1 January 1890. Most shaded areas represented land already owned by GBMA. Most roads were pre-existing public roads; the darker lines were roads already installed by GBMA or roads proposed by the federal government. The area marked by the author’s circle was mapped the prior year, shown in Figure 4, Image A.¹⁷ 

Figure 4

Maps of the Office of Department of Quartermaster, Washington, DC. Image A, 1 January 1889: Area marked by author’s circle specifies location of Lieutenant Malbone F. Watson’s Battery I, Fifth U.S. Artillery. Image B, 26 January 2025: monument for Watson’s Battery I. Image C, 1 January 1890: The ‘Plat of Land’ that would preserve The Wheatfield.¹⁸ 

Additionally, the federal/GBMA maps were quite specific in their inclusion of Union forces; for instance, one proposed road map noted the location of Lieutenant Malbone F. Watson’s artillery battery of four cannons, which had been in combat for a very short period of time during the bloody struggle for the Wheatfield, before being captured by a Confederate regiment and then retaken, but had been rendered unserviceable by Confederates. That location was later moved about 100 yards north of the road, standing alone atop a small knoll that overlooks the Wheatfield (Figure 4, Image B), so that it more accurately represented where the line of artillery was during the vicious fighting.

Ensuring that the Wheatfield would be protected like the High Water Mark, the Copse of Trees and Hancock Avenue, the ‘plat of land’ proposed in Image C was acquired and developed, enhancing visitor access by installing the roads proposed in Figure 3 and Figure 4. Virtually simultaneous with development was the installation of new monuments, like the 148th Pennsylvania Infantry (Figure 5), dedicated in 1889, the same year that the US Congress commissioned the maps. Modernisation and development went hand in hand with preservation and commemoration to freeze the landscape in time – while, oxymoronically, constantly altering it with new roads, pathways and relocations of monuments and cannons. The cumulative effect was to secure the landscape as sacred and iconic – for some Americans.

Figure 5

The Wheatfield. Image A, c. 1906: The monument immediately behind the trees is for the 148th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, but the walking path between the trees and the monument no longer exists. Image B, 26 April 2025: Extensive growth of the trees and underbrush immediately in front of the monument prevents a current photo from the same vantage point as 1906. Note the well-maintained, mowed walking path to other monuments, as well as the parking area and road, lined by more monuments, that now lies to the right of the monument.¹⁹ 

Racialised vernacular and the silencing of Blackness on the landscape

Freezing and developing the landscape, then, was done with great care and forethought. Similarly, as Rainey notes, designs and rituals for monuments were planned for months and years in the lead-up to installation and dedication – what Rainey astutely calls a ‘veteran’s vernacular’.²⁰ In the context of such deliberation, it is imperative to consider what was missing from that vernacular, and that it was a racialised vernacular. Simply because explicitly racist language was not a feature of Union dedication ceremonies does not mean the vernacular was not racialised. For example, the rhetoric of speeches ranged from pride for defeating slaveowners and ending slavery to a denial that slavery played any role at all.

Rarely did speakers reference Black people. Though slavery sometimes was addressed, it was as the institution of slavery or the Slave Power (the power of slave owners) while enslaved people as individuals who made up the institution, and the choices they made, disappeared in the rhetorical fashioning of public memory.

Paul Groth, quoting John Brinckerhoff Jackson, arguably the progenitor of landscape studies, states that ‘the beauty that we see in the vernacular landscape is the image of our common humanity: hard work, stubborn hope, and mutual forbearance striving to be love’. What kind of beauty, though, does the image evoke when the vernacular also inscribes the hard work of stubborn hatred and a mutual rejection of loving Black people? What kind of beauty is it when African Americans, whose lives were critical to how the landscape came to be, were excluded by racialised vernacular? For Jackson, landscape studies was ‘the exploration and speculation about meaning, especially for present-day inhabitants’.²¹ At least in the case of Gettysburg, explorations of what the landscape’s ‘beauty’ meant must explore what the gaze of white supremacy missed for over a century and a half.

Some scholars have started that exploration. Dell Upton asks what questions the landscape at Gettysburg elides, such as ‘what values specifically are the fundamental values represented by Gettysburg’s landscape’ and argues that it is necessary to ‘investigate the ways the landscape frames our perspective of the battle and inquire how we might reframe it’.²² Reframing can be accomplished by uncovering how the vernacular of the preserved, commemorative landscape’s alteration and expansion over the last century has diverted visitors away from contemplation of a larger scene and instead into a tightly bounded, zoomed-in focus on three days of fighting that has frozen the landscape in time.

As the maps above indicate, the park steadily expanded, from the late nineteenth century to at least the 2011 acquisition of the additional 95 acres mentioned previously. And, like the maps, the initial waves of nineteenth-century commemorations absented Confederate monuments, because the goal was transformation of the landscape into a commemoration of a tremendous Union victory. But by the 1910s white heritage groups from the former Confederacy had – again, somewhat oxymoronically – begun expanding the ‘vernacular’ or rhetoric of the park by including commemoration of southern soldiers, while simultaneously narrowing the conversation into even more constricted channels that made dialogue with visitors less likely to venture into any consideration of what brought soldiers to the landscape in the first place.

White supremacy often operates most effectively through silence. With the dedication of Confederate monuments, starting with Virginia’s state memorial in 1917 and ending (for now) in 2000 with a monument to the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment, the landscape fell silent through the twentieth century regarding the centrality of Black people in the story of why there was a war in the United States and a battle at Gettysburg. The rhetoric of white soldiers’ sacred duty and sacrifice muted the reality that Blackness and whiteness collided on the battlefield, from Black teamsters supporting Union troops to Black Gettysburgians who left town to avoid being kidnapped and taken into slavery by Confederate soldiers, to the African Americans west of Gettysburg who were indeed kidnapped, to the 8,000 to 10,000 enslaved labourers whom the Confederate Army forcibly brought to the landscape in order to drive wagons, care for horses, cook, dig latrines and do other vital logistical support work. Ironically, the erasure of Black and white people literally crossing paths on the landscape dovetails neatly with how many plantation tours in southern states today do likewise; one historian has noted that, on these plantations, ‘physical design worked to dissemble – and continues to dissemble – the basic fact of inescapable proximities’.²³

There was one exception to the rhetorical silencing of Blackness: the Gettysburg Cyclorama, a massive circular painting completed by French artist Paul Philippoteaux in 1883. The painting, which was so popular that Philippoteaux made a duplicate, was displayed in Chicago and Boston for almost 20 years. The painting, on display today at the GNMP Museum and Visitor Center, includes several Black teamsters. Before commencing the painting, Philippoteaux had come to Gettysburg in 1882 to gather information.²⁴ He must have learned from someone that Black men were an important part of the logistics of the Union war effort, including at Gettysburg, where they drove supply trains (Figure 6) and assisted behind the front lines with food, medical care, horses and other support work. Philippoteaux’s inclusion of Black men speaks into the silence; Black erasure did not have to happen.

Figure 6

Supply Train by Edwin Forbes. Hundreds of Black teamsters drove supplies to Gettysburg. The two men with whips are African American.²⁵ 

Despite Philippoteaux showing what was possible, by the late 1930s the rhetoric of public memory, manifested through speeches, tours and the discourse of the now 1,000-plus monuments blanketing the landscape, had completely displaced and erased Black people. Whiteness had swallowed up Blackness. Well into the twenty-first century, this rhetorical gentrification would continue protecting the landscape’s vernacular of whiteness, owing in large part to the heritage sector’s profitability. In 2023, visitors spent $786 million in the county, surpassing pre-pandemic levels, accounting for $80 million in taxes, over 5,000 jobs and $175 million in wages.²⁶

Industry of memory

For over a hundred years, as the ‘veterans’ vernacular’ swelled into a rhetoric proclaimed not only by veterans but also by their wives and daughters, descendants, politicians and historians, it became inseparably intertwined with the industry of memory to fabricate public memory. Rhetoric ‘typically understands discourses, events, objects and practices as timely, of the moment, specific and addressed to – or constitutive of – particular audiences in particular circumstances’.²⁷ ‘Lost cause’ rhetoric, a revisionist history that began immediately after the end of the Civil War, in which Confederates distanced themselves from slavery, described southerners as fighting nobly and honourably for freedom and independence against the overwhelming force of a supposedly power-hungry centralised government. White southerners became tragic victims and true Americans. That rhetoric, though, was not aimed only at white southerners but at white citizens outside the South, too.

Viet Thanh Nguyen defines the industry of memory as ‘the material and ideological forces that determine how and why memories are produced and circulated, and who has access to, and control of, the memory industries’. The ‘memory industry’, perhaps best exemplified by things such as selling souvenirs, is not the same as the industry of memory. The former is only one physical manifestation of the latter, much like how the arms industry – selling arms – is only one part of a grander war machine, which encompasses the arguably more important ‘ideas, ideologies, fantasies and words that justify war’.²⁸

The Virginia monument, dedicated in 1917, manifested how rhetoric and an industry of memory merged seamlessly to encompass white Americans across regions. Crowned by General Robert E. Lee astride his horse Traveller, it was the first Confederate state monument to be erected on the landscape that was initially meant to commemorate the defeat of the Confederacy (Figure 7). The organisers shrewdly cast this as a moment for all Americans – white, that is – by having the American flag, flown by the soldiers that Confederate soldiers had tried to kill in 1863, prominently displayed. The statue was unveiled by Lee’s granddaughter, standing next to a draped American flag. During his dedication speech, Assistant Secretary of War William Ingraham said, ‘we are not here to discuss the causes of war’, instead focusing on national unity, calling for ‘all our manhood, wealth, and energy’ to support the United States as it entered the First World War.²⁹

Figure 7

Virginia Memorial and Anne Carter Lee at dedication ceremonies at GNMP.³⁰ 

Missing from the rhetoric and industry of memory in 1917, and the century since, has been any public inclusion of Robert E. Lee’s enslavement of 189 African Americans, or that 44 per cent of the soldiers under his command were from slave-owning households. As one historian has noted, ‘slavery was an extremely powerful force in the lives of men in Lee’s army’.³¹

It is not easy, therefore, for today’s nearly 1 million annual visitors to learn how Blackness and issues of race permeate the landscape. While an excellent museum at the heart of the park communicates this part of the story well, a visitor – who has to pay to tour the museum, while touring the park’s landscape is free – could spend all day, every day, walking the battlefield and never learn that the battle and war would not have happened but for the presence of African Americans in the United States.

New rhetorical opportunities and obstacles

There are signs of hope. Over the last four years, six small, four-foot-high signs now refer to slavery, African Americans or race. The first was installed in 2021; in January 2022, the second was installed at the North Carolina memorial. Figure 8 is somewhat misleading – the monument in the background is massive, sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, an avid supporter of the Ku Klux Klan and sculptor of Mount Rushmore. It dwarfs the sign. Though many visitors do read the sign, many do not: it is common to see visitors drawn to the striking monument, bypassing the sign without reading its text.

Figure 8

North Carolina memorial and close-up of wayside marker, GNMP.³² 

Additional obstacles to altering the rhetoric and intervening in the industry of memory are legal and bureaucratic. Installing new monuments, or altering existing ones, requires legislation passed by both chambers of the United States Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives. A daunting obstacle at any time, it has become even more so given today’s bitterly divisive politics.

Other forms of discourse on the landscape are possible via tour guides. However, within the last two years, GNMP has instituted a policy requiring application for a commercial use authorization (CUA) licence.³³ In part, this is driven by the park’s commendable efforts to govern rhetoric disseminated by guides, as some still perpetuate lost cause ideologies that, intentionally or not, maintain a twenty-first-century version of white supremacist public memory. The potential downside of the new licensing policy, though, is that it may stifle the park’s stated goals of increasing public participation in the stories told on the landscape. Prior to the new policy, for instance, I worked with a variety of groups from around the country to tell stories like Hester’s. The new policy prohibits that without a CUA licence, which takes time and initially costs of at least $600 for insurance and fees. Despite this obstacle, GNMP had demonstrated important progress and intentionality in opening up the space to more stories that have the potential to shift the rhetoric.

New challenges, though, have arisen since the Trump administration took office that will, at least for the next few years, likely squelch that progress. For example, in February 2025, the new administration cut over a thousand NPS jobs, including five people at GNMP. A reduced staff, operating in a hyper-politicised environment that is actively hostile to diversity efforts, including efforts to diversify history, is even less likely to risk telling a more complete story.³⁴

Participatory public memory: making the unseen seen

Nonetheless, in some respects, GNMP has been, perhaps unwittingly, taking its first steps into what historian Liz Ševčenko proposes: participatory public memory, a process for dealing with ideologies, such as Lost Cause history that has shaped the landscape for so long, that deny soundly researched, evidence-based history. Participatory public memory can:

open a public sphere in which diverse participants wrestle with a social issue, engage in debate across differences on its causes and consequences, and collaborate on interventions … This pursues public history as more than a catalyst for civic engagement, but as its own form of active participation for social change.³⁵

Participation at a place like GNMP invites members of Gettysburg’s Black community to have their stories planted throughout the landscape outside the museum, and to do so via multiple mediums. For example, Gettysburg Black History Trail’s ‘digital passport’, available via mobile phone, went live in July 2024. The digital passport resulted from collaboration between GNMP and local organisations, including the African American-operated Lincoln Cemetery Project Association, which has restored and maintained the once-neglected Black cemetery. There are potential limitations, as the Cemetery Project Association is the only Black organisation involved and the trail is administered by Destination Gettysburg, whose mission is to increase tourism, not expand participatory public memory.³⁶ The trail guides visitors to five locations (two within GNMP) that are free and explicitly and solely connected to Black history; it directs visitors to another two free locations that include Black history (one within GNMP) but are primarily devoted to white Americans; and it takes visitors to four more locations (one being the museum within GNMP) that charge an entrance fee and primarily focus on white Americans. Nonetheless, achieving such a collaboration is a significant milestone, one that was not possible in the twentieth century.

Further creative change that can avoid the cumbersome requirements of federal legislation is yet possible. For example, a high school student recently suggested that Warfield Ridge’s 23-metre-high observation tower, which sits on land owned by a Black family who left during the battle to avoid being kidnapped, could be used for evening laser light shows, casting Black people’s comings and goings onto the landscape.

Part of what has made any such changes possible is the NPS’s 2001 directive calling for renewed civic engagement and public participation in planning and decision-making in order to, among other goals, ‘ensure that all voices are heard, but none dominate’.³⁷ One new manifestation of that goal is free walking tours conducted by a park ranger (whose name must be omitted here) and me across the landscape, telling a few stories about the thousands of enslaved labourers whom the Confederate Army forced to come to Gettysburg. The walks have opened up a rhetorical space for questions and debates – a key element in participatory public memory – and will hopefully continue.

Another vital element enabling Ševčenko’s participatory public memory to flourish is relationship-building between individuals and groups whose memories may conflict with one another. While this has happened in physical public spaces such as the walking tours, virtual spaces can also be useful, and perhaps even more productive. A locally produced podcast, Addressing Gettysburg, has built a significant audience over the last several years, partly by providing a safe space for differing viewpoints to be heard. The podcast’s creator and host, Matt Callery, does not provide space for lost cause ideologues but nor does he make time for people to simply mock them. Within those broad boundaries, though, the podcast has contributed to a public body of knowledge about Gettysburg and the Civil War by pulling people into a community of common interest, largely because of Callery’s perspective. As he says, ‘I want to get to the truth and in order to do that I have to listen to people who might not agree with me … I find my life to be so much richer because now I have friends who are all over the place [politically.]’³⁸ Though the podcast may fit into Nguyen’s industry of memory, it is perhaps a badly needed type of industriousness.

Conclusion: why Hester matters

Basil Biggs’s story as a landowner, who, for a time, owned the site that whiteness had decreed sacred for white Americans, North and South, is not told on Hancock Avenue. Biggs, after all, was not involved in the battle but only its aftermath, disinterring hastily buried bodies. His story of Blackness on the landscape, however, was not hastily buried but instead buried deep. Blackness has just started to peek above ground but could easily be scythed down again, even though the story of the Gettysburg landscape would not exist were it not for the stories of Black people.

Hester embodies that reality. When Hester escaped in 1847, she was caught in Carlisle by her owner and two men he had hired to help him. Norman, Hester’s husband, apparently contacted several members of Carlisle’s Black community. At the time, a judge had to verify if a Black fugitive was indeed an escaping slave. The slaveowner and slave catchers took Hester to the courthouse, where the judge ruled in their favour. Right after Hester was marched out of the courthouse to be forcibly thrust into a stagecoach that was waiting to take her back into slavery in Maryland, Norman and his allies pounced: they tore Hester away and sprinted down the street. The slave owner and his two men gave chase. At least 28 Black Carlislians pursued the chasers, picking up and throwing anything they could grab at the three enslavers. Something hard, probably a ‘paving stone’, smacked the slave owner in the back of the head, knocking him to the ground, where he ‘was struck repeatedly by the negroes as they rushed past him’. He died from his injuries three weeks later. The 28 Black men and women, and a white lawyer, were put on trial for manslaughter, with the prosecuting attorney telling the all-white, all-male jury that they must convict owing to the ‘momentous issues which hang upon the result’. At risk were ‘the social and political organization of whole communities. If you decide that these outrages can be committed with impunity, the foundations of the Government will be broken; this union[’s] States will be rent in twain … and the glare of a civil … war will light up the land’.³⁹

The attorney was prophetic: the thousands of escaping slaves indeed became one of the central problems that the country could not resolve. Hester’s story – not reported as ‘Hester’s story’, although were it not for her decision to seek freedom there would be no story – was reported in newspapers from South Carolina to New York to Indiana. An Ohio paper republished a South Carolina’s newspaper report that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was going to cut off its route into Pennsylvania because of the ‘recent disgraceful riot at Carlisle, Pa., in attempting by violence and bloodshed’ to free Hester from her enslaver. ‘So great’, the paper wrote, ‘is the feeling throughout the whole of the South … that Pennsylvania will be shunned in future by Southern dealers of all kinds’ who would refuse to ‘give their business to a State that is interfering with their constitutional rights.’⁴⁰

Eventually, the destabilising force of escaping slaves like Hester threatened the economic and legal security of too many white southerners. And, while historians are cautious about drawing parallels between past and present, because contexts and events that seem similar often have markedly different causes and effects, there are arguably disturbing comparisons to the present. Twenty-first-century Black resistance movements in the United States, most notably Black Lives Matter, have been a destabilising threat, generating the retrenchment of historic forms of, and the creation of, new expressions of white supremacy. For example, lost cause ideology retreated briefly when two Virginia public schools, named after Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, had their names changed in 2020 to neutral place-based names. But the lost cause charged forward again; local school boards voted to revert to the Confederate names in 2024. In 2025, the Trump administration has reverted military base names. Once named after Confederate generals, leaders in the killing of United States soldiers, they were renamed under the Biden administration. The 2025 names are supposedly not after Confederate generals but US soldiers who coincidentally had the same names as the Confederates. The subterfuge fools no one.⁴¹

The industry of memory, humming smoothly across today’s Gettysburg landscape, has made Hester’s story difficult to hear. The digital Gettysburg Black History Trail, new wayside markers and walking tours had begun to pierce through the drumbeat of white supremacist discourse to voice a more complete story of the landscape. Whether these efforts continue during the Trump administration remains to be seen. They should, because after all, it was Hester’s persistent desire for freedom, along with thousands of other Black women, men and children, that helped push the nation to a war that led to the battle at Gettysburg, which in turn produced the protected landscape of GNMP. Hester’s story is central to why this landscape is what it is today.

From that 23-metre observation tower, visitors can see the mountains that freedom seekers like Hester used to find their way out of slavery. These stories have been known for over a century and continue to cautiously appear on the landscape. In January 2024, for instance, after several years of work, the sign in Figure 9 appeared atop the tower, becoming the sixth to mention slavery or race.

Figure 9

Sign on Warfield Ridge Observation Tower, GNMP.⁴² 

The text reads, in part: ‘Before the Civil War, networks of safe houses across this valley sheltered freedom seekers escaping slavery via the Underground Railroad.’ It is a small step. But a step not possible in the twentieth century. We continue to work and hope for more.

Hester, by the way, did get free.⁴³

Research ethics statement

Not applicable to this article.

Consent for publication statement

Not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently blind the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.