Seven score and seventeen years after the roar of Union artillery and Confederate rifle fire fell silent on the Gettysburg battlegrounds, Adams County endured another invasion.
This one, on July 4, 2020, brought a Civil War-sized company of right-wing extremists, some heavily armed, onto the nation’s most hallowed ground in response to rumors that Antifa intended to burn an American flag in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery.
Although the Antifa threat proved false (again), the day’s incidents forced the Civil War community to take notice. If we are angered or dismayed at these demonstrations, we should not be surprised. Gettysburg has long been a landscape at the epicenter of debates over the war’s legacies and interpretations. The fiasco of July 4 is best understood as yet another layer in the history of a landscape that has been perpetually used, misused, defiled, and promoted.
Photographs and videos of the demonstrations quickly emerged on social media. One photograph captured a vehicle parked along Seminary Ridge displaying a Ku Klux Klan flag. If this seems shocking, we must recognize that the battlefield has long hosted KKK rallies, many paralleling the rise of the Second Klan. Likely the largest Klan gathering occurred in September 1925. Thousands poured into Gettysburg, gathered on Oak Ridge, and enjoyed two days of festivities. In the winter of 1926, local children roaming the battlefield with sleds in tow would find the town’s Klansmen “safeguarding” sledding paths on Seminary Ridge and Baltimore Street.
The battlefield remained a platform for racist discourse through the 20th century. In 1963, Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace visited Gettysburg and promised to stand for defense of the Constitution. A tangible manifestation of white supremacy appeared in 1967 when a cross was burned on Steven’s Knoll. As the new century dawned, Klansmen continued to rally at Gettysburg. I spent nine summers working for the NPS as a seasonal interpretive ranger and remember walking by various KKK “1st Amendment” rallies. Klansmen planned a rally at Gettysburg in the fall of 2013, only to be canceled because of the government shut down. During the battle anniversary in 2017, a similar incident occurred when armed vigilantes and Klansmen descended upon the town reacting to another supposed Antifa threat. The event passed with relatively little notice, although a man from Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, one of the “militia men,” accidently shot himself in the leg.
We must ask ourselves why the nation’s most infamous white supremacist group gathered on a landscape where Abraham Lincoln envisioned a “new birth of freedom” for the nation?