The dichotomy of Gettysburg

With all the history that is in this place, you’d be tempted to think that Gettysburg is a solid blue oasis in the middle of crimson-red central Pennsylvania. That lessons written in the blood of more than 50,000 Americans would suffice to enforce a Never Again. That anyone putting down roots in this little town would understand the insanity of civil war.

And you’d be dead wrong.

In 1863, General Robert E. Lee is said to have been disgusted that both Gettysburg colleges opposed slavery, that both supported the Union cause. Gettysburg is barely fifteen miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Pro-slavery sentiments were not hard to find in the area. Prominent families often split over politics in 1863, with sons fighting for both the United States of America and the confederacy.

The two colleges in Gettysburg stood firmly in Union ranks.

The Lutheran Theological Seminary, established in 1826, had admitted a Black theology student, Daniel Alexander Payne, in 1835. Payne was “born free,” his father having served in the Revolutionary War along with his brothers. Payne was not only well-educated before enrolling; he had also founded a school when he was only eighteen, teaching young Black children in Charleston, South Carolina.

Six years later, South Carolina made teaching children of color—free or slave, Black or indigenous, Hispanic or any other non-white ethnicity—illegal. Payne was forced to close his school and head north. He landed in Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg’s Lutheran seminary. Although he had been raised Methodist.

[The seminary continued to be progressive through the years. In 1945, a female professor was granted tenure. And in 1965, Elizabeth Platz graduated as the first woman to be ordained by a Lutheran seminary. Her ordination took place in 1970.]

Gettysburg College—then Pennsylvania College—followed the seminary in 1832. The same educators who established the seminary in 1826 founded a secular college six years later.

Both institutions were in the thick of the campaign. When I first moved here, someone told me that on July 1, 1863, students were sitting in their usual lectures in Penn Hall—at the time dormitory, classrooms, social space all in one. According to the story, a Union cavalry rider stormed into the building and told students and professors to evacuate as quickly as possible, that Confederates were coming.

I’ve often tried to envision the pandemonium that announcement must have caused. Apparently it’s not completely true, since at least a week before, Gettysburg students were mobilizing to join the Union cause.

No matter what is legend and what is fact, it is true that Lee expected to find pockets of Confederate sympathizers on the two campuses. And found none. Sympathizers were in the rural outskirts, farmers, mill owners, chair makers. Although many farmers, mill owners, and chair makers were also fully loyal to the United States of America.

My home and the house across the street exemplify those who supported the Union. The Taughenbaughs (who owned my property) were chair makers. The McCrearys (across the street) were tailors. The Kammerers were and are farmers. In 1863, all helped Generals Custer (yes, that Custer) and Farnsworth as they fought to prevent Confederate reinforcements from reaching the battlefield.

One hundred and sixty-two years later, I feel less certain that farmers, mill owners, and chair makers would support the United States of America should our constitutional crisis erupt into civil war. Our local state Senator, Doug Mastriano, organized the meeting at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg in November 2020, when he and his cohorts worked to assemble a group of false electors in accordance with the election denial plan put together by Donald Trump, Kenneth Chesebro, and John Eastman to overturn election results. Mastriano himself chartered the buses that took people from this area to Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. And despite his denials of participation in the insurrection (“I left”), there’s apparently video evidence to the contrary (Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 2021)

Our congressional representative is John Joyce, another Trump supporter who does whatever it takes to stay in power. I met with Joyce’s legislative director in March 2025 to discuss the topic of Fulbright and international education. Despite assurances of support received almost three months ago, Joyce caved.

On the one hand, you have the solid blue of Gettysburg College and the seminary.

On the other hand, you have overwhelming support for MAGA and Trump, even when that support is illogical. I shake my head when I see farms sporting Trump signs. Project 25 policies related to tariffs, immigration, grants, and more are killing local farmers, local industry. And still, they are in Trump’s corner.

I’ve also noticed that Gettysburg battlefield tours attract a boatload of historical revisionists. I lucked into a weekend at Little Round Top in late June 2022, shortly before the National Park Service shut down that stop for renovations (it has since reopened). I stood at the summit alongside the statue of General Warren. It’s an awe-some sight, looking down over Devil’s Den, understanding the horror of the hand to hand combat that took place where I peacefully soaked in a serene landscape.

And then. One of those enormous buses filled with too many tourists all at the same time pulled in and unloaded a bunch of old white Southerners speaking with thick drawls. A fat MAGA-bedecked man read a couple of the plaques.

Ya know, this is all lies. We won the Civil War. They can write whatever they damn want. Doesn’t make a difference. This is all bullshit.

It was all I could do not to explode, not to tell him to STFU. I imagine he’s never read a history book. Or if he has, it was one approved by the Texas State Board of Education.

Which is a shame, because on that hill, in that place, too many Texans, too many Alabamans, died because of the stupidity of Confederate officers. Regiments from Texas and Alabama had just arrived in Gettysburg, reinforcements for beleaguered CSA troops. They had marched 48 hours without food, without water, without sleep.

When they landed in Gettysburg, they gave all their water canisters to a few fellow soldiers to be refilled. Before their comrades-in-arms could return with water, the Texans and Alabamans were ordered to fight at Little Round Top. They didn’t stand a chance. Luckily.

That was not the only time during the Gettysburg Campaign when General Lee ignored the counsel of his supposedly trusted subordinates. From my reading and exploring the last three years, it seems that Lee thought he alone knew better. Someone told him the Union had retaken Culp’s Hill? Pfft. His ears had told him that CSA soldiers still held it. His generals told him taking out across an open field was a bad idea? He kept pushing until Pickett agreed to follow that insane order. Lee thought that taking Gettysburg would be a piece of cake, he could control “the ten roads,” and thus access to all critical seats of power? Without advance reconnaissance to know about telegraphs and trains and whether the two colleges would gladly support him?

Lee. Knew. Better. And. Lost. Lee’s successors continue to divide Gettysburg in 2025, continue to convince locals that Trump’s tariffs won’t destroy their businesses, that their legal immigrants won’t be deported to El Salvador, that the grants and subsidies to their farms won’t be cancelled, that their tax breaks will be saved, that their infrastructure projects will remain whole.

It is not even that Gettysburg is “purple.” That there’s a nice mixture of blue and red in this town that was a battleground 162 years ago. This town is still a battleground. Blue and red rarely mix.

The only events that seem to break down barriers, and I emphasize the word “seem,” are the Pride Festival at the first of June every year, The Gleaning Project’s annual event, and Fourth of July fireworks. In 2022/2023 as I attended every single festival and supported every single cause, I assumed the entire town was present. In hindsight, I doubt that was the case.

When you come to Gettysburg, keep this dichotomy in mind. We are a historical town whose history was pivotal for the course of American history—yes, history mentioned three times on purpose.

And yet we seem to be more representative of the chasm in twenty-first century America. The same chasm that gave us the gut-wrenching events of July 1–July 3, 1863. Instead of celebrating Lincoln’s transformative words of November 1863, current-day Gettysburg combines commemoration of that battlefield, that address, with the amnesia associated with insistence from some on plunging the United States of America into another civil war.

Ken Burns should do a documentary about Gettysburg as it is now. With clear warning about the path this dichotomy represents.

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