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"    Read the Esquire Gettysburg Reenactment series in its entirety here. When we started this voyage into the events of 150 years ago, I made the conscious decision to mix my tenses. Sometimes I would tell you stories in the present tense, sometimes I would give them in the past tense. This was deliberate, though it came over the objections of my primary editor, my Middlebury-educated-English-major-diplomat wife. I wanted to bring you into my world. Where I live, the past and the present are so deeply intertwined that there is barely a moment in my day-to-day work life when I am not drawing an inference, a parallel, or a lesson from something that happened in the last century, or the last millennia. Actually, that applies to my home life as well. The fact is that I can no longer help myself. These things now come unbidden. This is probably why the Army decided that I was no longer honest enough to be a noble infantryman and instead transitioned me to being a strategist. Their reasoning, apparently, was something like this: If you want somebody who can think in big chunks of time forward, find somebody who is used to thinking about big chunks of time, period. Historians fit that mold, and so here I am. And, of course, thinking about the past and how to explain it to all of you this past month has made me think about the future.  Well, perhaps the right word is actually legacy. What will the historian of the future make of the writing I am leaving behind? What will he think about Iraq and Afghanistan as seen through the lens of my writing? Historians work with the written word, and over the past couple of decades I have spilled an awful lot of ink.  We have been fighting for almost 12 years now. Men and women like me have deployed year after year. We have gone to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to the wars and back again over and over. And in that time the butcher&amp;#039;s bill has been real. It stands at 6,735 by the last count. So historians will look at these wars, and in so doing it seems quite likely that they will use some of what I have written.  Which makes me wonder, what will that legacy be? How will I, and my peers, be judged for our role in these wars, in 100 years or 500? How will the wars themselves be interpreted through the written record? Arguably I have penned more books, articles, and major blog entries than any of my generation, so that material will exist for the historians to decipher \u2014 just as I have, with the writing of men long dead, for you.  Well, interestingly, you could make a strong argument that what I have said and recorded based upon my own observations and experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan will actually matter less than what that historian in the future brings to the table himself. Which brings us to our story, the story of the man who made Gettysburg the &amp;quot;Turning Point,&amp;quot; and though you have probably never heard of him, a lot of what you think about Gettysburg was shaped by what he did.  The man who created much of the narrative of Gettysburg as we know it today was a landscape painter from New England named John Badger Bachelder, and what he was trying to do at the outset was just some basic research for his next painting. He had no background as a historian, nor any experience as a writer. What he was looking for was some drama, and at least a little accuracy. What he created was the central story of the largest land battle in American history.  One historian of early photography, William Frassinato, made an interesting discovery when going through all of the wartime and post-war photographs taken in and around Gettysburg in the 19th Century. It seems that for at least the first five years after the war there are no photos taken of the iconic location where &amp;quot;Pickett&amp;#039;s Charge&amp;quot; culminated and then failed. Tourism was already picking up in those years, and visitors (mostly from the north) were already turning the town into a vacation destination. This in turn fuelled the development of photography companies in Gettysburg that would &amp;quot;capture the moment&amp;quot; for visitors to the battlefield. But of all the pictures taken, not a single one was at the location most people now think of as the centerpiece of the battle and the moment of greatest drama. How could that be?  The simple answer is that at the time, nobody thought of Gettysburg as the definitive &amp;quot;Turning Point,&amp;quot; and the idea that Pickett&amp;#039;s Charge was the &amp;quot;High Water Mark&amp;quot; had not even been invented yet.  Back at the beginning of the Civil War Bachelder had been planning to make a painting based upon the events at Bunker Hill (well, Breed&amp;#039;s Hill really, but that is beside the point), the first really big fight of the American Revolutionary War. Probably he was doing this in the hope that it would prove a popular image and be reproduced widely. It was only a decade since Leutze&amp;#039;s Washington Crossing the Delaware had proven such a big commercial hit. But Bachelder&amp;#039;s problem was that he could not find enough detail to make such a painting with any degree of accuracy, so he abandoned the project. After all, the biggest war ever fought on the continent had just kicked off. Surely in this new war there would be a crucial dramatic moment he could immortalize in paint.  By 1862 he is actually accompanying the Army on campaign, waiting for the crucial tipping point and making contacts with various officers. Like many, he got sick while in the field. Unlike the soldiers, however, he could go home to recover. This is what he did, after getting promises from some officers that if there ever was a big battle worthy of his attention, they would notify him. Then Lee came north.  Bachelder was actually on the Gettysburg battlefield only days after the armies departed. He immediately started making sketches of the surrounding terrain, and then started conducting interviews with participants. Soon, in his quest for ever more knowledge, he was back with the Army of the Potomac again, moving among the generals and colonels, collecting their accounts of the fight and trying to reconcile the often contradictory accounts he was accumulating. By the winter, he had already amassed an impressive collection of firsthand statements about who was where, when, and what they did. Or at least he had a mass of material about what people thought they did, where they thought they did it, and when they thought certain events took place.  But Bachelder did not stop there. He sent out mass-mailings, querying other men who had been there as well, and he interviewed and interviewed and interviewed. By the next spring he came out with his first product. But it was not a painting; it was a map.  This map showed the battle-lines, the positions of units and their movements through the fight, and it was an instant hit. It was also his first published document and went a long way towards making him the &amp;quot;official historian&amp;quot; of the battle. His lithograph-reproduced version was, as it would have to be, only the barest of outlines. But it was the first one that could even begin to be described as authoritative. Then the war ended and Bachelder no longer had convenient access to so many of the men who had fought at the Battle of Gettysburg. That did not stop him though, and soon he was reaching out to those veterans from the rebel army for their accounts and descriptions.  Bachelder still seemed intent on eventually making a painting of the battle. He desperately wanted something that would become iconic, and make him a tidy profit to boot. But his problem was that he just kept amassing more and more information, and never seemed to decide, &amp;quot;Well, that&amp;#039;s enough for me to start painting.&amp;quot; Still, if he was going to make a painting, that painting would have to be about the critical moment, not just of the battle, but of the war overall. So it was up to him to shape popular perceptions not just about the specifics of the battle, but the importance of the battle to the overall war.  According to Bachelder&amp;#039;s later written work, it was in 1868 that he first used the term, &amp;quot;the high-water mark of the rebellion,&amp;quot; during an exchange with the former Confederate general James Longstreet. By that point Bachelder was making good money off of reprints of his original map he had made during the war, so he had hired another painter to make the actual image while he wrote an accompanying explanatory pamphlet to go along with the painting which was entitled, &amp;quot;The Repulse of Longstreet&amp;#039;s Attack.&amp;quot; Longstreet had come to look at the work while it was developing and he and Bachelder talked about the battle. The next year, during a gathering of veterans, Bachelder was talking to Longstreet&amp;#039;s former aide-de-camp who also made a similar point. And that was when the idea of &amp;quot;The Angle&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The High-Water-Mark of the Confederacy,&amp;quot; and indeed the entire concept of Gettysburg being the &amp;quot;turning point&amp;quot; of the war really started to take off. Bachelder doubled down on his efforts, publicizing accounts from the battle and collecting more and more materials even as he placed his own stamp upon the narrative. And that is when people started to visit that spot on the low rise of Cemetery Ridge, and take pictures.  By 1880 the unofficial, untrained, but eminently enthusiastic New England landscape painter became the first quasi-official historian of the battle when Congress voted him a grant of the then-princely sum of $50,000 to write the first major book to explain the entirety of the battle. Bachelder by this point was involved not only in collecting the memories of the men who had been there, but also in approving the memorialization of the units (well, the American units anyway) in granite and brass upon the battlefield itself. Of course, in the process he was further advancing his own idea about what was the most important, and what might not be so critical. It was through his constant work and publications that those terms he coined, &amp;quot;High Water Mark,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Angle,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Copse of Trees,&amp;quot; infiltrated the shared perception of the veterans of the battle. Then, significantly, it was echoed back by them in their own writing, thus giving circular validation to Bachelder&amp;#039;s efforts.  And that, friends, is how legends are really born.  Now for some personal news. Esquire.com seems to think that all of you have rather enjoyed this little romp through our shared history, and so they have invited me to stick around on a more regular and sustained basis. So this is not the end, friends, but apparently only the beginning. I will be writing about more of the war in the weeks and months to come, usually on a regular weekly basis (same Bat-time, same Bat-channel), but sometimes synchronized with a particular battle or event. I will still pop in with other off-topic contributions, as the opportunity may present itself, but this Esquire 150th Civil War Reenactment will continue for the foreseeable future. (Although after 29,000 words, you&amp;#039;ll excuse me if I take a wee bit of a break.)  I will be back next month when we will start looking at the events in Tennessee. The campaigns over there are coming up. So in August we will look in on the Union army&amp;#039;s success in taking Chattanooga. Then in September we will see that same army get the snot kicked out of it by the rebels at Chicamauga, though one man will stand like a rock. Finally, November will bring us to the renewal of American fortunes on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain.  As always, you can write to me at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.  And now, a brief annotated bibliography for those who want to do a little more reading on their own. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a23946/legacy-of-the-battle-of-gettysburg-071613/>