150 Years Ago Today: Pickett's Charge; My Experiences at Gettysburg

Stogie at Gettysburg

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the "high water mark" of the Confederacy when 12,500 Confederate soldiers attacked Union defenses on Cemetery Ridge.  The Confederate troops were told to focus on the Copse of Trees on Cemetery Ridge, and began a fast walk forward towards the Union lines.  The Southern lines were showered with canister, shells and musket fire and few actually reached the stone wall (a barrier of loose boulders piled in such a way as to make a kind of fence).  The great Confederate General Lewis Armistead was shot down just before reaching the Angle, a bend in the stone wall.  A monument today marks the spot where he fell, and I have been there.  The Angle is still there as well, with no hint of the desperate fighting that occurred there.

There is an excellent photo essay of reenactors at Gettysburg this week, and they have recreated the sights and scenes of that momentous battle with incredibly authentic detail.  See it here.

I was at Gettysburg in August of 1992, as a Confederate reenactor and extra ("background artist") in the Ron Maxwell movie "Gettysburg," based on the novel "The Killer Angels."  Bro and I had prepared for the filming for weeks in advance; I had grown a salt and pepper beard and we flew to Virginia where we rented a car and drove to Gettysburg.  We arrived and set up our tent in the Confederate camp, where we stayed for the week, constantly wearing our heavy woolen uniforms and marching at daybreak with other Confederate reenactors over grounds where the actual Confederates marched and died 129 years before.  With our uniforms, 1857 Enfield muskets (working replicas), canteens, haversacks, cartridge belts, rough brogan shoes, bayonets and other gear clinking and clanking to the tramp of marching feet, we took our places in the lines and prepared to once more assault the Union lines beyond the wooden fence bordering the Emmitsburg Pike.

                                                                                      Reenactors at Gettysburg, 2013

It was a hot, uncomfortable, busy week, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.  It was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, and not because we were in a movie, or rubbing elbows with famous actors like Martin Sheen (as Lee) or Stephen Lang (as Pickett), but because we were paying homage to our courageous forbears in what was almost a religious experience.  As we the Confederates quietly passed the statue of General Lee on Seminary Ridge, where the real Confederates began the charge, we entered the actual Hallowed Ground to form our battle lines.  The Copse of Trees on the horizon is still there, and the grassy green expanse in front of us seemed silent and sacred.  How very different from that day in 1863, when the field between Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge was filled with roaring cannon and the rattle of  musket fire, billowing gun smoke, whistling shells and the screams of dying men, a scene of  blood and carnage, of dead men and horses.  Though the field before us was now silent, we could see, hear and smell the battle in our imaginations.

Soon our long gray line was marching forth, our red battle flags unfurled to the Pennsylvania breeze.  Many Confederate descendants, overcome with emotion, wept.  Bro and I marched forth with fixed bayonets, shells exploding on either side, rockets streaming over our heads, around dead horses here and there, onward toward the wall!.  We were finally shot down at the Angle (filmed later at an alternate location), and it was an honor to "die" for the Southern Cause.  One of our members actually did die, of a heart attack, later that week.  Actor Sam Elliot later led a memorial service for him and one other reenactor who died as well.

Bro and I were members of the First Virginia Infantry.  After the filming, we drove to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond and walked among the graves of the Confederate dead.  General Pickett is buried there, as well as many of his men.  We found one tombstone that identified the dead as a member of the First Virginia who fell at Pickett's Charge.  We also visited the graves of Jefferson Davis and Jeb Stuart, who are buried close to each other.

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That's my Pickett's Charge tale, one that I and Bro actually experienced in the flesh.  Somewhere in the film "Gettysburg," there is a scene of grizzled, smoke stained Confederates marching toward the camera at the outset of Pickett's Charge, and for a few brief seconds, I am visible in the line, black slouch hat on my head, shouting at the other troops to "straighten that line."  Bro appears right behind me, for only a second before the scene ends.

Gettysburg: H.L. Mencken Put It All In Perspective

As the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg approaches, I think it is appropriate to pierce the self-delusion of Yankee apologists and dreamers with a quote from H.L. Mencken.

by H.L. Mencken

The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

Four States Consider Nullification of Obamacare

The Tenth Amendment Center states that four states are planning to vote on bills that would nullify Obamacare, making the law null and void and unenforceable in those states.  Another ten or so states are mulling over the creation of similar bills.  Nullification, an old American strategy, may yet be the best way to end the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The principle of nullification is not new, and is described in Thomas E. Wood's book 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask.  The Virginia Resolutions of 1798 concluded that if the federal government should encroach upon the powers reserved to the states, the states have a right to nullify the offending law and refuse to enforce it—after all, a law that violates the Constitution is no law at all. Taken together, these ideas became known as the “Principles of ’98."

It doesn't matter if a federal court, including the Supreme Court, decides differently.  Ultimately, it is the right of the individual states to determine the constitutionality of any federal laws and choose to obey them or not.

This principle has precedent in American history.  Of course, there is the well-known "Nullification Crisis" of 1833, when South Carolina passed an ordinance of nullification against the 1828 federal Tariff of Abominations that would have greatly increased the tax on imported goods from Britain, resulting in a significant lowering of British demand for Southern cotton.  President Andrew Jackson was prepared to send federal troops to South Carolina to enforce the tariff, but a compromise ended the crisis.

However, that nullification crisis of 1833 wasn't the first time individual states have nullified federal laws.  The first was by Massachusetts, reacting to federal government's Embargo of 1807.  This embargo was designed to punish Britain and France for depredations of American neutrality rights on the seas, and prohibited any American trade with foreign nations whatsoever.  The U.S. Navy was to enforce the embargo by stopping and searching merchant ships -- a clear violation of the 4th Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.  Further, the embargo badly damaged the New England economy.

A federal district court ruled the embargo constitutional, but Massachusetts did not agree, and passed state laws to nullify the federal embargo.  The nullification held.  The important thing to note is that the federal court's decision was not the last word on the matter.   The Massachusetts House explained:

“Were it true, that the measures of government once passed into an act, the constitutionality of that act is stamped with the deal of infallibility, and is no longer a subject for the deliberation or remonstrance of the citizen, to what monstrous lengths might not an arbitrary and tyrannical administration carry its power…. Were such doctrine sound, what species of oppression might not be inflicted on the prostrate liberties of our country? If such a doctrine were true, our Constitution would be nothing but a name—nay, worse, a fatal instrument to sanctify oppression, and legalize the tyranny which inflicts it.”  (Thomas E. Woods, 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask.)

The Governor of Connecticut, John Trumbull, agreed with the Massachusetts legislature, stating:

“Whenever our national legislature is led to overleap the prescribed bounds of their constitutional powers, on the State Legislatures, in great emergencies, devolves the arduous task—it is their right—it becomes their duty, to interpose their protecting shield between the right and liberty of the people, and the assumed power of the General Government.”  (See Woods Jr., Thomas E. (2007-07-10). 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask (p. 30). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.) 

Conclusions:  Nullification of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is both legal and constitutional, and is undoubtedly the most expedient way to dispose of this unconstitutional and oppressive federal law.  However, each state will have to pass its own separate nullification laws.  Which state will be the first to do so?  Once one does, others will quickly follow.