When Duty Called, They Came

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

In his mind he marched with Pickett and Pettigrew in the masses of the main charge across the rolling fields and up to the stone fence and over, where the Confederacy reached its high-water mark. He stood in his imagination for a moment with the few troops who had breached the Union line, his heart working to grasp the commotion and the meaning of those terrible days 115 years ago at Gettysburg.

Jimmy Carter, Southerner, President, last week stalked the ridges and swells of Civil War tragedy, fascinated, brooding. And in his mind, he retreated with the flower of Southern manhood across that wide field of death, back to the South, defeat and a century of humiliation that he feels he was somehow sent to right.

"I wish that Jackson had been here," he said quietly as he listened to Historian Shelby Foote talk of "that terrible, terrible day" at Gettysburg. "Ewell would have done better if Jackson had been here. Lee should have listened to the Georgians that day." The Georgian Longstreet had strongly urged Lee not to fight the Battle of Gettysburg.

Foote told of the Confederate valor. Of General Armistead, who, with his hat on his saber, reached for the muzzle of a Union cannon, then fell with mortal wounds. He told of retreat. A young Southerner going down the slope walked backward so he would not be hit in the back. Robert E. Lee met his men with tears in his eyes to tell them it was his fault. "He pretty much told the truth," said Carter, pondering the lapses of judgment that are now attributed to Lee, who was almost superhuman in all other ways, in most other places.

No President reaches the White House without some knowledge of history, some sense of his own destiny. They all are, after all, the products of some special historic force, Carter perhaps more than any other President since Franklin Roosevelt. Once on the job, every one of them feels a singular kinship with the past. Their interest in the men who have marched before them deepens. They search for new meaning in the successes of their predecessors, seek solace in the frailties. They join the processions of history.

Jimmy Carter and his wife and his mother-in-law began in the early morning of last Thursday, and by dusk they had been from Gulp's Hill at Gettysburg (also stopping not far from the battlefield for a friendly visit at the home of Mamie Eisenhower) to the site of John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry. The President leaped up on the rocks, put field glasses to his eyes to peer into the woods and gazed on the weathered monuments. Was Lee trying to save ammunition at Gettysburg? he asked. Where was the wheatfield? How far did Pickett have to come? (Nearly a mile.) "Why Lee did not bring his generals together that night, I'll never understand."

Carter asked the park officials to put a marker where Georgian Ambrose Wright had breached the Union line on the second day of Gettysburg. Then he stopped down below to see the monument to the Georgians, put up on the spot where they assembled. "When duty called, we came, when country called, we died," it read. So sad and sobering, mused Carter, yet men so brave.

He pondered the little things that shatter human aspirations. Lee had been given some raspberries by Marylanders on his way to Gettysburg. He had eaten them and had an upset stomach. Had that figured in Lee's problems? "I'll tell you," smiled Carter, "I've been in Mexico when for a couple of days I could not have led anything."

The President laughed about Hood's boys at last getting a hot breakfast at Antietam when they were interrupted by a Union charge; they were so mad that they stopped the superior Yankee force in its tracks. Carter was tickled by the account of how the cannons at Antietam stirred up the hives of bees kept by the farmers. One Pennsylvania regiment had 127 bee stings. The President leaned on the bridge over Antietam Creek where General Burnside with four divisions had been stalled for hours by Robert Toombs with a few hundred of those beloved Georgian sharpshooters.

Jimmy Carter went back to Camp David that night a wiser man. He cannot plan the future from what he saw and felt last week at Gettysburg or Antietam. But he could not lead without it.

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