Barnabas Notes

I went for a bike ride this morning on a route I call, Short Valley View. It takes me right out along Seminary Ridge right along the line where 145 years ago today 12,500 confederates prepared to make Pickett’s Charge. We’ll get back to that.

I’m currently reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. My sister got this for me for two three Christmases ago and I’m just getting around to reading it now.

The book looks not only at Lincoln but also his chief rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860. These rivals later became prominent figures in his cabinet. This isn’t like Senator Obama making Senator Clinton his Vice President, without a lot of constitutional power. It’s like Senator Obama making Senator Clinton his Secretary of State, with a bureaucracy and power base all her own.

A big part of the book is looking at the correspondence of Lincoln’s rivals. All of them, including Lincoln, have incredibly intimate male friendships. The way they talk about each other when read in the 21st Century seem even romantic. For example here is an excerpt of a letter from Edwin Stanton to Salmon Chase:

no living person has been oftener in my mind;—waking or sleeping,—for, more than once, I have dreamed of being with you. The strength of my regard and affection for you, I can, thus tell more freely than were we face to face.

Goodwin is quick to point out that reading romance into these words is to misunderstand the time and apply our understanding to an era where almost all prominent men had such intimate relationships with other men.

Which brings me back to Pickett’s charge. Facing each other that day were Lewis A. Armistead a southern General and Winfield Scott Hancock from the north. Hancock had served as Armistead’s quatermaster during the Spanish American War. The two men were friends and it is reported that when Armistead was leaving to join the confederacy he pledged to never raise a hand against Hancock in battle, “May God strike me dead.”

Armistead’s brigade advanced the furthest on July 3, 1863 with Armistead leading the men from the front with his hat on the tip of his sword. He was shot three times as soon as we went over the stone wall that marked the Union Line. He died three days later. Hancock was wounded but survived the battle.

So as I rode along the line and looked out to the high water mark, the furthest advance of the confederate line on the 3rd day of battle at Gettysburg, I thought of these two friends, friends who had a friendship more intimate than our society could understand fighting over ideas.

Not over land or oil or global domination but over ideas.