Class Year
2018
Document Type
Blog Post
Publication Date
5-2-2018
Department 1
Civil War Institute
Abstract
The first time I learned the story of the Bryan family and their Gettysburg farm was when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. For Coates, there was something poetic about the fact that the climax of the Civil War’s bloodiest and most well-known battle—a moment forever enshrined in Confederate memory thanks to the likes of William Faulknerand Ted Turner—occurred on land owned by a free black man and his family. Pickett’s Charge—the greatest symbol of Confederate martial honor in the Civil War canon—had been repulsed on property that represented so much of what its participants fought to prevent: freedom, prosperity, and dignity enjoyed by African Americans. [excerpt]
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
Lauck, Jeffrey L., "Between the World and Them" (2018). The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History. 313.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/compiler/313
Comments
This blog post originally appeared in The Gettysburg Compiler and was created by students at Gettysburg College.