Gettysburg in Texas: The Challenges and Rewards of Teaching Military History Beyond the Battlefield

By now, you’ve read Rick Herrera’s essay on the great pedagogical benefits of the staff ride, and you’re probably dying to add it to your teaching toolbox, but maybe, you live too far from battlefields and your students can’t afford to travel there? Luckily, that doesn’t mean that you need to give up on teaching battlefields altogether, nor that you cannot integrate many elements of the staff ride into your course. In this essay, Cecily Zander explains how she overcame the challenges of teaching the battle of Gettysburg without her students ever leaving Texas.

When I began training to be a military historian my mentors repeatedly emphasized the value of bringing students to battlefields. There was no better way to teach about what happened, they explained, than to place students in the catbird seat of history—allowing them to see the places they were reading and learning about and to visualize history beyond the page.

 And they were right. There is no classroom experience that can substitute for standing atop Hazel Grove and picturing the cannon fire poured into the retreating Union army from Edward Porter Alexander’s Confederate artillerists at Chancellorsville or walking in the traces of George Pickett’s division as they moved from the Codori Farm across the undulating ground toward the copse of trees at Gettysburg. But, unlike my mentors—who teach in Virginia and Pennsylvania, within a few hours’ reach of a dozen Civil War battlefields—when I taught a two-week intensive course on Leadership and the Battle of Gettysburg for advanced undergraduates and history majors at Southern Methodist University, I did not have the luxury of telling my Dallas-based students to meet me at the Gettysburg Visitor’s Center at 8AM for a day of touring around the battlefield.

 Instead, my students and I held a pseudo-staff ride. And in general, it was a success. By the end of my class, students were able to assess how their chosen leader performed over the course of the three days at Gettysburg by relying on the sort of texts that usually supplement time spent on the battlefield: primary sources, secondary readings, modern military doctrine regarding leadership, and maps. Their success on the assignment had little to do with me—they were an excellent and motivated group that showed interest in the subject matter and initiative when it came to their research. Nonetheless, as I realized in the process of assigning final grades, the papers did lack a sense of distance and scale that students might have attained had we been able to walk the Gettysburg battlefield.

 Teaching Gettysburg in Texas, however, did afford me the opportunity to consider how those of us not lucky enough to live within reach of battlefields can close the gap with our fortunate peers who can spend the day with their students in a plein air setting.

 My first suggestion might be obvious, but even I underestimated the value that maps have in a classroom setting. And the more detailed the maps, the better. When students cannot see distances, for example, having a map with distance clearly labeled is key. And maps must indicate topography of the battlefield, for when soldiers discuss the challenge of attacking a higher position, much of what they worry about is topography. But I also went beyond what appeared on the maps themselves. I took students out in front of their campus classroom and pointed to familiar campus landmarks that might approximate the distance between the two points covered by an attack. Students know how long it takes them to walk between the liberal arts building and the student union. Asking them to consider that length of time, the imperfections in the sidewalk or terrain, and the frustration of hundreds of bodies moving along the same route between class periods gives them a starting point for considering how battles played out in often chaotic fashion.

 Second, it is worth taking the time to break down terminology for students, especially when teaching those without military experience. In my case, focusing on a battle in the mid-19th century also meant explaining the terminology used by soldiers in their own era and allowing students to debate how those understandings might differ. Students spent considerable time in my class, for example, examining and debating Robert E. Lee’s order to Richard S. Ewell on the afternoon of 1 July in Gettysburg. Lee asked Ewell to take the heights of Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” Ewell did not find the order to be practicable, but in our discussion, much hinged on how that term should be defined. Students need to understand not only how they might interpret such a directive in the twenty-first century, but also what Lee—a nineteenth-century military officer—would have meant by the command.

 Students also were interested in terms like sanguine—in reference to an officer’s assessment of their position and battle plans—and commanding—a word often used to describe elevation during the battle. Encouraging students to use context clues and decipher meaning helped move their understanding forward. In addition, relating nineteenth-century military terminology to present-day doctrine was especially useful for students in analyzing elements of leadership prized by the Civil War generation, all of which may seem archaic but can be related to modern leadership values. For its accessibility I gave students excerpts from Army FM 22-100.

 Finally, students worked to create a common language and rubric outlining the important qualities they felt defined Civil War leaders. Because students did not have direct access to the battlefield and could not make the challenges of geography a central element of their analysis, they shifted their focus to other critical decisions leaders need to make while fighting the battle. Though I worried that lacking a strong sense of topography and geography would lead to weaker papers, my concerns were misplaced. Students simply prioritized other issues. Instead of focusing on the impact of topography and geography, students thought about leadership in terms far more relevant to modern military questions—including strong analyses of the various costs exacted on both armies throughout the course of the three days’ fighting in Adams County, Pennsylvania.

 Their alternative questions, such as “do high casualties during an assault or a battle reflect poorly on an officer in command?,” opened doors for us to discuss how our collective ideology of warfare has changed over time. Students came to realize that there is a vast difference between the military culture of their own world, where casualties from individual battles are rarely counted in double digits, and the Civil War, where casualties in the hundreds and thousands could mount in a matter of hours. Such recognition allowed students to decide whether they wanted to apply modern standards to the past, or whether they felt they should judge Civil War leadership by nineteenth-century standards. Their choices (either acceptable as long as it was acknowledged or justified) helped students understand how history, memory, and personal experiences all overlap—and provided them firsthand experience of being historians.

 While I will always wish my students could have seen Gettysburg for themselves, their energy and commitment to the idea of writing about leadership helped them overcome this deficiency with ease. And, as is almost always the case, my best ideas as a teacher really came from them—and from their leadership in the classroom. Still, I hope they all can make their way to Gettysburg someday—and that walking that battlefield will only help them understand more fully the lessons they taught me through their research, writing, and conversations.