TTC - The Great Tours: Civil War Battlefields

On October 3, 1889, a 42-gun salute rang out from the national cemetery at Gettysburg. Addressing the crowd gathered at one of the most important battlefields of the American Civil War, General Joshua L. Chamberlain observed, "In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays."
In the decades following the Civil War, the number of monuments dedicated on the war's battlefields rapidly increased. But as the number of monuments increased, so did the meaning of the fields. Veterans came to honor the sacrifices made by their comrades, to celebrate their own valor, to mark the lines of battle, and to try and arrive at moments of reconciliation. Even today, tourists from across the country (and the world) come to Civil War battlefields to learn how such battles were waged-and how historical participants made meaning of such horrible violence and killing.
No book can capture what it meant at that time to stand along the crest of Marye's Heights in Fredericksburg and look down upon the vast plain stretching to the Rappahannock River. No speech can evoke the spectacle of the crater at Petersburg, where Union troops exploded four tons of powder under Confederate lines, or the intensity of the scene at the parlor of the McLean House at Appomattox Court House, where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. To see the ground and the locations where such momentous events in American history occurred, to stand on them with your own two feet, helps to make clearer sense of the war that tore a nation apart.
Noted Civil War historians Caroline E. Janney, the John L. Nau III Professor in History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia...

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