As someone with a respectable level of interest in American history, and who often finds himself despairing of our current shrieking, partisan, political acrimony (I mean, is there anything we collectively agree on and support—or condemn—regardless of which color state we’re from?), it’s always gnawed at me that I haven’t visited the “Ground Zero” of American fractiousness and reconciliation.

Gettysburg.

I’m a Connecticut Yankee (so to speak), and to reach southern Pennsylvania is a simple, sub-300-mile ride. Not quite a day-trip, but not exactly an epic adventure. As an old friend of mine would say about such a modest endeavor, “I can fart that out over a salad.”

So with New England’s optical and olfactory salad of spring well underway—the forsythia has burst golden, the cherries are pregnant with color (though not yet in spectacular labor), and nature’s pre-dawn alarm clock of robins, cardinals, and chickadees ringing before five AM—it was time to gas up, saddle up, and get thee and the Guzzi to Gettysburg.

So last Tuesday, April 14, I set off on an easy—if dull, truck-laden and unseasonably hot—slab ride down from CT. En route you nip a corner of New York, cross the mighty Hudson via the “new” Tappan Zee Bridge (good luck getting me to call it the “Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge” — it’s TZ forever), traverse the more gardeny part of the Garden State, and then wend your way down through Pennsyltucky. The Cumberland Farms stations become 7-Elevens become Sheetz. My Guzzi thrums away, unperturbed by towering semis and over-caffeinated commuters, Starbucks in one hand, cellphones in the other, only God-knows-what piloting their lane-wandering SUVs.

But I made it to the battlefield unscathed, and set up camp here at the eponymously named Union Hotel. It’s a shit-ton nicer than a Hampton Inn (no shade on Hamptons—they’re entirely respectable, just generic), and smack dab in the center of a handsome, tidy, nineteenth century town. (Which is an obvious upgrade from the chain hotels that generally boast views of highway overpasses.)

For a one-night stay in Gettysburg, I can’t think of a more perfect Union.

Since I rolled in around supper time, first order of business was finding some chow. I seriously contemplated eating here because, well, how couldn’t you?

But I needed to cool off first over a beer, so hit The Sign of the Buck next door. And by the time I got to the bottom of my pint (and after having spent the better part of a day and 275 miles in the saddle), I didn’t have the energy to get up again. So I stayed for dinner.

It was on point.

If you haven’t visited Gettysburg yourself, it’s worth knowing that the historic battlefield itself ranges across almost 18 square miles. While the town itself is small, the fields of battle around it are not.

The landscape—rolling fields, graceful hills and ridges punctuated by copses of trees, and sight-lines often a mile or more—has been thankfully and meticulously preserved by the US National Parks Service, and is criss-crossed by well-marked public roads, allowing anyone with a car, motorbike, bicycle, tour bus, or a pair of walking shoes to thoroughly explore it.

I decided to do a self-guided “auto tour,” downloaded in the form of an app, and GPS and Bluetooth enabled so as you follow the route, a narrator explains what you’re seeing, gives historical and military context to that particular location and the role it played in the battle, and provides turn by turn directions in real time. I used Action Tour Guide, and found it to be excellent.

One of the benefits of using a self-guided audio tour is that you can go any time you’d like. And since I’m an early riser and wanted to absorb Gettysburg far from the madding tour-bus crowds, I was wheels-up at 7 AM. And for the next three and a half hours, I had the entire battlefield to myself.

It was a stunning, if somber, ride.

There are literally hundreds of cannons dotting the landscape, along with more than a thousand monuments and markers to honor regiments from both the Confederate and Union Armies.

These include state monuments and regimental monuments, with some paying homage to particular military units (i.e. Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, Sharpshooters, and even Volunteer Militias). Most of these were dedicated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Wikipedia, they constitute “one of the largest collections of outdoor sculpture in the world.”

Each one of these stone tributes was more poignant than the next, works of artful somberness to memorialize so many thousands of young lives lost in the battle here. Kind of hard to imagine how a nation could come together after such cruel, brutal, and catastrophic bloodletting. But here we still are.

The bronze and granite specificity of so many of these monuments—often listing the state, the particular regiment, and the precise number of soldiers killed and injured at Gettysburg—took a lot of the abstraction away from what, for many people (myself included) remains a distant and vague grade school civics lesson.

They really do help you sense and feel the loss here.

One of the “newest” Gettysburg monuments is the “Eternal Light Peace Memorial,” dedicated in 1938, and featuring an eternal flame with the hopeful words, “PEACE ETERNAL IN A NATION UNITED.”

Sadly, that remains pretty aspirational. While our States still may be “United” in 2026, we’re more like a “Nation in Rancor Eternal.” Not exactly living up to the better angels of our nature that Lincoln had hoped for…

Anecdotal parking lot sidebar:

As a northerner and New Englander, I feel the “presence” of the Revolutionary War way more consciously in day-to-day life than the Civil War. All around where I live in Fairfield County, CT (and in southern Manhattan where I worked for many years), there are still loads of historical markers that, for me at least, keep the Revolutionary past if not exactly present, at least in my peripheral view.

There’s the cannons at Compo Beach (in Westport, where I live) commemorating the Battle of Compo Hill; the nearby Battle of Ridgefield, where a local building up the street from a restaurant we frequent still has a cannon ball lodged in its second floor; General Putnam’s Continental Army winter encampment in Redding, where I frequently ride. And places like Fraunces Tavern, the oldest bar in NYC, a great place for a bourbon and burger, and the site of George Washington’s farewell to his officers.

But the Civil War, which is chronologically closer to the present to us by almost a century, and whose fissures we still seem to be trying to reconcile to this day, somehow seems more distant and remote to me. Maybe that’s due to geography; obviously, I know that the Union was comprised of northern states (including ones where I’ve lived). But since the war itself took place geographically in the south, around a social structure predominantly maintained, exploited, and defended by southern states (namely slavery), it’s always seemed weirdly distant and “away” to me.

So I was struck and moved by the number of monuments at Gettysburg honoring soldiers from northern states like New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine. I know that these states were all part of the Union, but I’ve never really thought of the Civil War as having been fought by actual New Yorkers per se. And apparently (so I learned on the tour), the sacrifices by, for example, Mainers, were utterly heroic and tragic.

So thinking of the Civil War “distantly” (as I have) is obviously myopic and a little silly on my part. And it took visiting Gettysburg and seeing monuments to New Yorkers, Nutmeggers, Vermonters, and Mainers who marched hundreds of miles south to die on the fields of Gettysburg to really appreciate their valiance, and the commitment of my geographic forebears to protect and preserve the American Union.

Anyway, back on the bike and to the battlefield…

The tour took me up to the crest of the famous Little Round Top…

…and then down through the Valley of Death, around Devil’s Den, across the infamous Bloody Wheat Fields, and then in a loop around the summit of Culp’s Hill.

After about three hours or riding, looking, listening, parking, dismounting, inspecting, absorbing, and re-mounting my modern metal steed, I found my way to Cemetery Ridge, where I parked the bike for one last walkabout.

This was the site of Pickett’s Charge, and the “high water mark” of the Confederacy. It marks the Confederate Army’s furthest advance northwards before being beaten back by Union forces, with General Lee and his army retreating to Virginia, and ultimately (two years later) losing the war.

The Union may have prevailed by putting its trust in God; but as this monument attests, they did so by also keeping their powder dry.

I don’t think The Band specifically had Gettysburg in mind when they wrote The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, but I couldn’t get that song out of my head as I rolled away from this quite literally hallowed ground.

The tour concludes in front of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, where President Lincoln gave his immortal Gettysburg Address, and where 3,500 soldiers (from the more than fifty thousand that died there) are buried. His brief speech—a mere 272 words—is memorialized on a simple granite stone just down the way on Baltimore Street, with a statue of that Great American standing atop his own exhortation to all Americans, words that are just as urgent, relevant and meaningful today as they were in November 1863.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—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.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about this all 290 miles home.