How we remember Gettysburg

After the Battle of Gettysburg ended, 43-year-old Basil Biggs, a prominent member of the black community in the once-thriving town, returned to his tenant farm to discover the cost of the largest battle of the war. Gettysburg’s prewar population was around 2,400, 8% of it black; within days, it had been swallowed by 165,000 soldiers. What remained of Biggs’s farmhouse was the remnants of a makeshift hospital: carpets, floors, and furniture soaked through with blood. Walking his land, he found his livestock slaughtered, crops destroyed, and 45 shallow graves of Confederate soldiers. On the first of the battle’s three days of horror, he had fled on a borrowed horse, along with most of Gettysburg’s black citizens, fearing enslavement at the hands of Robert E. Lee’s