I mentioned in my column today about visiting Gettysburg. That was a week ago today, and of course, today is the 142nd anniversary of the last day of the battle. After the news of his death came between that day and this, a friend mentioned that Shelby Foote had maintained that one should always visit Civil War battlefields at the same time of year of the battle — partly so you’ll have similar weather, but also so that the foliage will be the same, so you can see things as the participants saw them.

Well, I did that, unintentionally. And I sincerely hope that it wasn’t as hot this day 142 years ago in that spot as it was last week. (One night last weekend, well after dark, my rental car informed me it was still over 90 outside — in Pennsylvania.) The men who were there suffered enough as it was. It was pretty rough strolling around there in a T-shirt; I can’t imagine fighting even in tattered butternut homespun, much less in a heavy wool dark blue military blouse.

As uncomfortable as it was for me, I have to praise the selflessness of my wife and youngest daughter for accompanying me. Touring battlefields is obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, and they really wanted to get over to Amish country the other side of Lancaster (given Amish pacifism, about as sharp a contrast with battles as one can find).

Being semi-sensitive to their wishes (we DID get to see some beautiful Amish farms before dark, just as the folks who own them were riding home in their buggies or taking their Sunday rest clad in plain finery, in perfect gardens and alongside covered bridges), I decided to take a hit-and-run approach to the site.

I determined that I would find the spot on Little Round Top where, on the second day, a professor of theology named Joshua Chamberlain and his understrength Maine regiment acted with unparalleled courage in one desperate moment and saved the United States of America. (Yes, I realized that’s debatable, but if he had not stopped the Alabama troops who were trying desperately to outflank the Union line, this pivotal battle could have pivoted the other way.) I just wanted to stand in the place where history had stood on a cusp and was decided by sheer, suicidal determination. I expected to feel the power of the place. I didn’t realize that I would be even more awed by another spot altogether.

The ranger in the main building could hardly believe that was the only place I wanted to go. Still, she patiently showed me on the map the best way to get there, bypassing most of the carefully laid-out tour. When she asked if I was sure that’s the only place I wanted to go, I felt bad enough (her manner seemed to imply that my hurried approach showed insufficient respect to the dead whose final resting place Abraham Lincoln had dedicated only about 100 yards from where we stood.

So I added, "Where’s Cemetery Ridge?" "We’re standing on it," she said. "So where’s the stone wall?" "Right over there, the other side of that building." OK, then. I’ll check that out, too.

That was the thing, as it happened, that blew me away. I knew that the Federals had taken the high ground before the battle even started, and that Pickett’s Charge (as well as the advance of other elements of Longstreet’s corps) had been doomed from the start as a result. But to stand on that high ground, and look out at the perfectly clear fields of fire that looked down on the completely open plain upon which the Virginians advanced — not a scrap of cover to speak of; the trees they emerged from looking to be close to two miles away — I could feel what it must have been like to keep marching into certain death. The men who landed on Omaha Beach had a better tactical advantage than those Rebels did. And still they marched on. Could there have been one of them who expected to live through the next hour, much less prevail? And yet still they advanced.

No movie, no book — no matter how it tried to dramatize what happened — could capture the sheer futility of that situation the way I perceived it standing there and looking down upon the place where it happened. This photograph doesn’t do it. You have to stand there and let your eyes wander from  the stone wall to those trees so far away, to the flatness below, to the markers behind and around you telling how many batteries of Union artillery poured lead and fire down upon the Southerners.

Little Round Top, when I went there later and saw where Col. Strong Vincent told Col. Chamberlain to "hold this ground at all costs" was every bit as inspiring as I expected it to be. But it didn’t have the emotional kick of standing at the High-Water Mark of the Confederacy and seeing where it left its stain on the magnificent countryside of Pennsylvania.

What was Lee really thinking, attacking the Union center so pointlessly after two days of other, wiser tactics failing? Was it a sort of ennui? A gesture of fatalism? Was he just fed up after three years of mostly successful campaigning? Did he just want an end to it either way — either break the Union Army completely right there in that moment, or suffer a defeat so crippling that it would hasten the inevitable end? (I’m sure there are many reading this who are far better-read than I about Lee’s motives, but who can really know?)

As glad that I am that the Confederate cause failed, I mourn those Southerners who gave their lives so uselessly. If I watch the movie version of this battle, I want to shout at the screen, "Listen to Gen. Longstreet, Marse Robert! Sometimes we South Carolinians know best!" I want his men to live.

But maybe that couldn’t be. Maybe the cliche that the sin of slavery could only be washed away with oceans of blood, both Northern and Southern, is the pure and simple truth. (And please, neo-Confederates, don’t start on the "it wasn’t about slavery" kick. Almost every political interaction between North and South since the beginning of the nation, from the Constitutional Convention through Bleeding Kansas, had in one way or another been about that one issue. Talk about tariffs and such all day, and you can’t get around the fact that one of the two economic systems involved in the debates was founded on slavery, which gave the land its economic value. Talk, as George Bush’s critics do today, about how the Republican president kept changing his stated rationale for the war as it wore on. None of that changes what is obvious to anyone who is not just bound and determined to rationalize that which cannot be justified. Read what the South Carolinians who made the decision to secede said to explain themselves — and don’t forget to do a search to see how many times "slave" occurs in the document. It just doesn’t matter that most Southern soldiers didn’t own slaves; that fact just makes them the victims of those who did.)

Maybe the fact that both North and South had winked at the problem for four score and seven years, tiptoeing around the issue in flawed compromise after compromise in an effort to keep the young nation together, meant there had to be such a titanic holocaust offered on the altar of fratricidal war. You can read that thought in books, but it just doesn’t have the same force as standing there, sweating and weary and ready to go home, upon the altar itself.

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