In the woods to the west is Confederate Avenue where Lee’s army faced the Union lines. Sprinkled lightly along its length are 11 monuments erected by former Confederate states and a number of signs describing troop movements. Mostly, that’s it.

The simple explanation for this disparity is that Union veterans created the park. After the war, regimental associations purchased pieces of the battlefield to erect their own monuments. Among the first was a hill called Little Round Top where, in 1889, veterans of the 20^th Maine marked their repulse of a rebel attempt to seize this commanding position.

Eventually, these pieces morphed into a single park run by a national organization of Union veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR).

The GAR didn’t forbid Confederate monuments, but its rules about where they could go and what they could say infuriated the southerners. What the GAR ruled was that monuments belonged on the military units’ line of battle – that is, on their starting positions. For the Union, that meant Cemetery Ridge; for the Confederates, along Confederate Avenue.

Confederate veterans wanted to place their monuments near or within the former Union lines, to show how far the rebel regiments had gone in their various attacks.

Alabaman William C. Oates, for instance, led an effort to erect a marker at the farthest point reached by his 15^th Alabama when it assaulted Little Round Top. That point was east of the monument erected by the 20^th Maine. Believing this belittled his regiment, the 20ths’ former colonel, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, objected. The application was denied.

Such conflicts were repeated again and again. Ultimately, rather than be told where and how to erect their monuments, most Confederate veterans decided not to erect any.

Cost was also an issue. After the war, Union veterans went home and prospered. Confederate veterans went home to Reconstruction. Most didn’t have much money to put up monuments, especially to a battle they had lost.

So, there is an odd dichotomy between the two sides’ monuments. The Union monuments were nearly all erected by those who fought. They are relatively straightforward, telling just the facts. There are also a lot of them – too many, say historians who think a cluttered battlefield is hard to understand. Confederate monuments were mostly erected by the next generation, or even generations after that. The last Union monument went up in 1907, but the last Confederate state monument was erected by Tennessee in 1982. An equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. James Longstreet was unveiled in 1997.

As time went by, the Confederate cause became harder to defend. So, most Confederate monuments instead emphasize the bravery of the Confederate soldier. Maybe the best is the 1929 North Carolina memorial, created by Gutzon Borglum of Mount Rushmore fame, which depicts a wounded officer encouraging his men.

The most profound difference, however, may be their few numbers. Without the granite clutter, what’s left is mostly empty woods and a clear view across the long meadow that was the scene of Pickett’s Charge. When Abby and I parked near the Virginia Memorial, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the Confederate army had just departed.

*  *  *

David, James, Joseph and Creed Heckman had enlisted in the rebel army in 1861. Creed joined the 24^th Virginia; the others, Company C of the 57^th Virginia, the so-called Franklin Fire Eaters.

When the armies came to Gettysburg, the Heckmans already had two years of battle experience. After brutal fighting at Fredericksburg the previous December, they had spent the spring besieging a federal supply depot at Suffolk, Virginia. Now, the 57th – one of five regiments in a brigade commanded by Gen. Lewis Armistead – and the 24^th Virginia were both part of a division assigned to bring up the rear and protect the rebels’ supply trains. Commanding the division was Gen. George E. Pickett.

By dawn on July 3, the Union and Confederate armies had been banging at each other for two days. Pickett’s men were relatively fresh, so they were chosen to lead the charge Lee thought would win the battle and, perhaps, the war.

Ordering 15,000 men to charge across a mile of open ground against nearly 100,000 Union troops sounds crazy. But Lee thought his enemy would run, as they had at Bull Run (twice), on the Yorktown peninsula, at Chancellorsville and, two days earlier, here at Gettysburg.

If they ran again, the entire Union army might collapse. That would leave open the road to Washington or, possibly, to Philadelphia, the Union’s manufacturing and transportation center. Then, a few days’ march could have brought Lee’s 70,000 men tramping down the Lancaster Pike and crossing the Schuylkill River.

*  *  *

Abby thought all this was moderately cool. She’s a sixth grader at Tredyffrin-Easttown Middle School which faces the Old Lancaster Pike. The idea of a victorious army marching past seemed…just right. Then, she paused.

"Tell me again what all this has to do with us," she asked.

We sat for a moment on the tailgate and opened a spiral-bound notebook that contains a copy of our family tree. Starting with Rachel and Abby, we climbed the branches: Me, then "Grammie," then the great grandmother she dimly remembers and through preceding generations until we got to Betty. Then I jumped to Bill – siblings, she understands – and told her again about Bill’s four boys who, 139 years earlier, had stood on approximately that spot.

"But what were they fighting about?" she asked. We put the book away and walked past the Virginia memorial – a 38-foot monument topped by a mounted Lee – to a cluster of cannon on the edge of the woods. At the visitors center in the distance, tour buses were passing. On the Confederate side, for the moment, we were alone with the cicadas.

"Remember your friends, Josh and Tiffany?" I asked. "And your (pre-school) teachers, Martha and Chris? Did you know that, a long time ago in this country, black people were bought and sold like we bought your hamster?" Abby winced at the comparison.

"Yeah, I guess so," she said.

"Well, people in the south thought that was OK, but were afraid people in the north would try to stop them," I continued. "So, they decided they wanted their own country where they couldn’t be stopped. They sent this army to make the United States let them have their own country."

Abby’s eyes widened. She looked aghast.

"And that’s what my cousins were fighting for!?" she asked. I nodded.

Nearby, we encountered a small cluster of tourists. A guide was pointing out Little Round Top, where the Union artillery had been massed, and the cluster of trees at which Pickett had pointed his troops. "Try to imagine," he was saying, "marching from here to there with that artillery raining shells on you." But Abby had lost interest.

"Dad," she said, "it’s hot out here."

*  *  *

Armistead explained it differently. Sticking his hat on the end of his sword, he called out to the Heckmans and their comrades to "remember…your wives, your mothers, sisters and your sweethearts." With that, they moved forward toward a distant clump of trees where the Union army waited behind a stone wall.

Both sides remember Pickett’s Charge as a magnificent spectacle. But two thirds of the Confederates were dead or wounded by the time they reached the Union line. Armistead himself was shot down while stepping over the wall.

According to his 1907 obituary, David Heckman also crossed the wall and was shot in the left hand. James and Creed survived unhurt, though James was captured when Richmond fell; I don’t know what became of them after that. Joseph was killed.

The next year, another of Uncle Bill’s sons, Ferdinand Heckman, 18, enlisted.

*  *  *

Experienced genealogists are wary of family pride. First, it makes people lie. People want to remember grandpa in a certain way, so they embroider some stories and forget others altogether. (Much of what passes for our national heritage is the result of the same treatment.) According to my father-in-law, Owen Zebley Pyle described Antietam as "a lot of running and screaming." In reality, he may have spent the battle behind a tree.

Second, there are the numbers. Start with the fact that we all have two parents and four grandparents, and that the number of ancestors doubles in each preceding generation. Trace six generations – the distance that separated Haley from Kunta Kinte – and you have 126 direct ancestors. Trace 12, and the number grows to 8,190. Admire everyone in a crowd that size? Try if you like, but you’ll have to abandon all your values.

Third, and most important, we’re all related to some degree. Some genealogists guess that we are no more distantly related to any person on earth than 40^th cousin, maybe 50^th. That includes Grant and Lee, George Washington and George III, the Bushes and Osama bin Laden. Theorists even postulate about the number of Mayflower descendants in China, based on the number of New England ships in the 19^th Century China trade and the estimated percentage of sailors who did what sailors do when reaching port.

Personally, I think the Heckmans fought for an evil cause. And, no, I don’t cut them a break because they were family or because they fought bravely, as I suppose they did. Bravery and kinship are irrelevant if harnessed to evil. We can do better.

*  *  *

Gettysburg’s visitors center is a mausoleum of guns and swords, but at least it’s air-conditioned. Inside, we were delighted to find two walls covered with photographs of the soldiers of 1863. Abby found five members of the 57^th Virginia, including Horace Mangrove Giannini (a grandson of Thomas Jefferson’s Italian gardener) and John Henry Miles. Miles, a member of Co. C – the Heckmans’ company – held a pistol across his chest and stared at us from beneath a broad black hat. I don’t pretend to know what he had been thinking.

Before we headed home, Abby and I walked to the "Angle," that point in the Union line toward which Pickett’s men had marched. A mile away was the white Virginia memorial. We agreed that, even without someone shooting at you, it was a long way to walk on a hot day.

She didn’t tell me until later, but Abby also pocketed a penny. Someone, perhaps for luck, had dropped it near a small monument marking where Armistead fell and – who knows? – maybe where Joe Heckman also died.

It was, of course, a Lincoln cent whose symbolic value they would have likely despised. Perhaps they’d have considered its removal a service. With relatives, you just never know.

Mark E. Dixon