This week, Mrs. Rieux and I are joining millions of our fellow Americans heading toward Washington, D.C., to see our forty-fourth President--my former law school professor--inaugurated. I'd like to record the events of our nine-day trip in diaries; even if no one reads them, at least I'll have a nice scrapbook.
But if you're interested in following along as two Obama volunteers take a trip to the Inauguration and points beyond, read on....
If you'd like to read the previous installment in the Travelogue, it's here.
Day 1: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C.,
via Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Ellicott City, Maryland
[T]his campaign can't only be about me. It must be about us; it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice--to push us forward when we're doing right, and to let us know when we're not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.
By ourselves, this change will not happen. Divided, we are bound to fail.
But the life of a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible.
He tells us that there is power in words.
He tells us that there is power in conviction.
That beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people.
He tells us that there is power in hope.
Saturday dawned uncomfortably early for us Central Time Zone dwellers, but we were able to hit the road before too much daylight had wasted. After a quick drive-by picture-taking at the impressive Pennsylvania state Capitol, we were on our way to the Gettysburg National Military Park and its new Visitor Center, which has been open for all of three months. (Have you ever seen a cornerstone that reads "2008"? I know I hadn't.)
Gettysburg, of course, is the site of the pivotal battle in (at least the Eastern theater of) the American Civil War--the July 1863 clash in which Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, on a mission to thrust deep into Union territory and thereby force a negotiated peace, were finally turned back by Union general George Gordon Meade and his Army of the Potomac. The Union and Confederate armies at Gettysburg, put together, numbered more than 165,000 men; after three days of fighting, more than 50,000 of them--nearly one in three--had been killed, been wounded or gone missing. The Confederacy fought on for nearly two more years, but after Lee's defeat at Gettysburg (and the comparably crippling loss of Vicksburg, Mississippi, one day later), the rebellion's fortunes never recovered.
The Gettysburg battlefield today is littered with monuments (which name various units, individuals, and in a few cases even entire states' forces) to the men who served at Gettysburg during those three days. A tour of the field, such as the one Mrs. Rieux and I took today, consists in large part of proceeding from monument to monument, trying to piece out the uncommonly consequential things that happened on that ground nearly 150 years ago.
We trekked up Little Round Top and saw the marker on the spot where Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment were positioned in a desperate defense of the hill on the second day of the battle; various presenters of Civil War history (most prominently Michael Shaara and Ken Burns) credit Chamberlain and the 20th Maine with saving the Army of the Potomac, if not the entire United States of America, that day.
No Minnesotan's visit to the Gettysburg battlefield can be complete without approaching the Monument to the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, located just north of Little Round Top. The 1st Minnesota was the first state volunteer regiment formally tendered to the federal government (thanks in large part to the fact that Alexander Ramsey, Minnesota's second governor, happened to be visiting a new Illinoisan President in D.C. when the call for volunteers came out). On the second day at Gettysburg, the 1st Minnesota took unprecedented casualties--83% of their number--in a desperate charge into a much larger Confederate force, a frantic delaying tactic designed to allow the Union to bring up reinforcements to plug a hole in the Union line on Cemetery Ridge.
A day later, what was left of the 1st Minnesota helped to repel Pickett's Charge, the doomed 12,500-man attack across a mile-wide open plain that is widely considered the greatest blunder of General Lee's career and the end of the Confederacy's hopes of winning the war. That day, the Minnesotans captured the precious battle flag of the attacking 28th Virginia Infantry--and we've still got it. Despite increasingly angry and bitter entreaties from Virginia's political leaders that have lasted into the current century, we're doggedly holding onto that flag: the historical relic still resides with the Minnesota Historical Society. (I've seen it when it has occasionally been displayed in the Rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol.) As the deputy director of the Minnesota Historical Society has stated, that flag has serious historical value for us, too.
So in at least one small way, the Civil War continues; and this Minnesotan, currently sitting in Arlington, Virginia, would be more than a little perturbed if we were forced to return it to commemorate a regiment that fought to preserve slavery.
And then, of course, are the Electoral College maps at right; exciting as it is to see the blue incursions into Florida, North Carolina and here in Virginia (though my current location is "Communist country," right, Joe?), it's hard for a liberal Yankee like me to avoid seeing the red of the Southern Strategy at right as a simple carry-over of the red of the Stars and Bars. The nastiness that led to slavery and secession was beaten once, but it merely came back as (among too many other things) the Klan, Jim Crow, and entrenched and open racism, misogyny, and gay-bashing. (Please note that I'm not remotely claiming that we blue states have been free from any of that, except perhaps de jure Jim Crow. We're far, far too "red" ourselves to brag about anything.)
But in that case, how much did we really win at Gettysburg?
Well, as was made clear on that battlefield six months after the guns fell silent, there was a "gangly, self-made lawyer" from Illinois who thought that Americans had achieved something important there:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
(I can never get through that speech without tearing up. The short documentary playing in the Gettysburg Visitor Center's theater included Sam Waterston's fabulous reading--"...of the people. By the people. For the people. Shall not perish from the earth."--and it just about had me bawling today.)
So if slavery and the Confederacy begat Jim Crow, Fred Phelps, David Duke and Proposition 8, in 1863 there was also a "new birth" of a response to them: from the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address (and the "last full measure of devotion" so many gave then and have given since) came the Fourteenth Amendment, and later the Nineteenth, and then the Civil Rights Act and Loving v. (ahem) Virginia and Goodridge v. Department of Public Health and Lawrence v. Texas. Among much else.
So now (to swipe Morgan Freeman's closing narration from the Visitor Center film) we are all "met on a great battle-field" of the current war. The outgoing administration has laid waste to the country and indeed much of the world, inflicting casualties in numbers that dwarf Gettysburg's. Global ecological catastrophe appears near-inevitable, if not imminent. Despised minorities remain second-class citizens, denied equal protection of the laws. Bloody and brutal conflicts continue in several parts of the world. And we're giving Rick Warren a platform to speak to the world.
But at least, after eight years of especial horror, one great battle is ending on Tuesday. And a gangly lawyer from Illinois (or not really--but then Lincoln wasn't really, either) is coming, and he certainly seems to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us. I don't know if he's up to it, because I don't know if anyone is. Still, he's right: there is real power in words, in conviction, in community, and in hope. For now, there is reason to hope.
* * * *
Okay--enough with the melodrama. (Gettysburg tends to do that to me.)
Mrs. Rieux and I lit out from the National Cemetery when it closed at dusk and headed off for Ellicott City, Maryland, home of a married couple who are former grad-school classmates of the missus'. We had dinner at a nice Italian place along with the couple and their overly cute eight-month-old son, and then we moved on toward the Potomac. Turned the rental car in at National Airport and then met up with two of Mrs. Rieux's Virginian cousins, who trundled us and our stuff back to the Arlington apartment that'll be our home base until Wednesday. We immediately started drawing up action plans for the next three days; a big item on the agenda is a supply run to Target and Dick's Sporting Goods this morning.
Then, this afternoon, it'll be time for the big "opening ceremonies" concert at somebody-or-other's memorial. Here we go!
If you'd like to read the previous installment in the Travelogue, it's here.