GETTYSBURG — This is the most American of towns. It is where Robert E. Lee tried to destroy the nation, where Abraham Lincoln tried to heal it, and where William Faulkner revealed a century later that the country was still irretrievably racist and broken.
Even though much of its bloody Civil War past is hidden behind McDonald’s and Burger King and Dairy Queen and Walmart, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, today is still the symbolic capital of the endless American fight over the nation’s history.
Inevitably, that fight always comes down to race.
And so that means that this is the town that best explains Donald Trump.
Once you understand that Trump’s rise is all about white fears and white power — the same motivations that triggered the Civil War — the Trump agenda begins to make sense.
Gettysburg is where the Confederates invaded the North to make their ultimate bid to protect slavery and white supremacy. Pickett’s Charge, on July 3, 1863, the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, lives on in Southern mythology as the so-called “high tide of the Confederacy,” the closest that Southerners believe they came to winning the Civil War.
But it really wasn’t that close. Pickett’s Charge was a disaster for the Confederates, a bloody massacre of thousands of rebel troops. After Gettysburg, it was just a matter of time before the Confederacy’s ultimate defeat.
Lincoln recognized Gettysburg’s real significance as the beginning of the end and so came here to give his most iconic speech to explain what the war was about.
When he said in his Gettysburg Address 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,” Americans at the time understood what he meant: an oligarchic slavocracy could not be allowed to run the nation.
But after Lee surrendered at Appomattox and the war ended in 1865, there were still millions of white people in the South who refused to accept the death of the slavocracy, while many more of their descendants have never accepted that white people and Black people can truly live as equals.