Black at Gettysburg

What was it like to be an African American at Gettysburg in 1863?  As Kevin Levin points out, many of them, like Abraham and Elizabeth Brian, were not present during the battle.  The Brians and their family fled the town when they heard that Lee and his army were approaching.

Read Levin’s essay about Gettysburg’s African Americans at the History News Network.  Here is a taste:

Four months later Abraham Lincoln paid a visit to Gettysburg to dedicate a new cemetery for those Union soldiers, who “gave the last full measure.” His brief address called on Americans to see the war through to its end in the name of a “new birth of freedom.” By then a number of black residents from Gettysburg and the surrounding region had returned and like others struggled to put the pieces of their lives back together and return to some sense of normalcy. Others chose not to return at the risk of what might happen if Confederates chose to push north again. An unknown number never returned to the area. The feint echoes of their voices should serve as a warning to those of us who in the early afternoon of July 3 will gaze out on the undulating fields between Cemetery and Seminary Ridge with a child’s imagination of what might have been. We would do well to remember that the ebb and flow of the two armies leading to and from Gettysburg rippled through the surrounding countryside. For the unknown number of African Americans rounded up by the Confederate army, who called Gettysburg and the surrounding region home, Union victory mattered little. For them a new birth of freedom would have to wait just a little longer.