Chicago to NYC – Day 19

Monday, October 14, 2019

Start: Hagerstown, Maryland
End: Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Mileage/cumulative: 36 / 938
Elevation Ascended/cumulative: 2,060′ / 20,935′
Weather: Sunny, 42º at start; sunny, 71º at finish;Winds: light
Flat tires (entire group) day/cumulative: 0 / 5

Well, I’m a few days behind writing about our adventure. I guess that means we’ve been having too much fun! 

Day 19 was another short ride but with over 2,000 feet of climbing in only 36 miles, it gave our legs a good workout after so many days of flatter routes. Most of the short rides on this trip have been due to lodging logistics on stretches where accommodations were limited. Today’s ride was abbreviated for a different reason – we were meeting a guide for a four-hour bike tour of the Gettysburg battlefield.

I’d last been to Gettysburg about 15 years ago and saw the battlefield by car, following the Park Service’s automobile audio tour. Seeing it on a bicycle provided a true sense of the difficult, undulating terrain that the Union and Confederate armies fought on. The Battle of Gettysburg took place over three days in July 1863 and our guide led us around the field in chronological order.  It’s difficult to describe the size of the battlefield and the level of destruction that occurred when these two armies converged on tiny Gettysburg, simply because that’s where the roads intersected.

Near the end of our tour we stood on Cemetery Ridge, where, on July 3, 1863, 6,500 Union troops watched 15,000 Confederate soldiers run out of the woods and, led by Major General George Pickett, charge over three-quarter mile of open ground susceptible to cannon fire the entire time. The ill-fated Pickett’s Charge resulted in over 6,000 Confederate casualties and marked the end of the Battle of Gettysburg.

As we stood on “a great battle-field of that war”, I reflected on President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, made only four months after the battle at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. We can each recite “four score and seven years ago…” but it’s his call to an “increased devotion” that came to mind and feels so relevant today.

“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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot 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 here 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.”“