How on earth did i end up here welcome back everybody today we are in gettysburg pennsylvania let me just keep you guys this way sorry for the bad camera angles but i wanted to check this out we are in grass right now so that’s why i’m walking but we have some pretty cool
Statues and cannons and monuments not sure who these people are major major general oliver otis howard united states armory army looks pretty cool wow this place is full and rich with history everywhere you look i read somewhere that i think it might be one of the most
Places with the most amount of monuments and placards with just little things on it and i think somebody said there was 14 000 14 000 different things you can look at and read that’s just insane i mean look there’s more statues over there not sure who that guy is let me know if
You guys know now first off let me just say guys i am not a historian i’m not even that good at history okay i’m just a guy who likes to roller skate so if i do get something wrong in this video please just correct me in the
Comments don’t say i’m dumb or anything because i admit i don’t know a lot but before we kind of get into stuff let me tell you you do not want to miss how this video ends and where this video is going very shortly this is just the
Beginning we have a lot to see a lot to do this happens later we’ll let you know that in the battlefield here itself we don’t allow we rollerblading kicked out that is correct um you will get to see that later but for now i would like to say i need to get over
These rocks that’s not what i wanted to say i want to say thank you to all the members of the channel you guys support me and i appreciate that so much as well as the subscribers thank you to all the subscribers that tune in every week to kind of watch me
Do different stuff you guys are very much appreciated we are on the road to 30 000 subscribers we hit our 20 000 goal couldn’t ask for more but i guess i am let’s try and get to 30. now with all that out of the way we are going to be taking a look
At our first cool area we’re kind of in the town area the battlegrounds and all of like the kind of bigger stuff happened kind of that way but right here is the jenny wade house looks like this is the gift shop i’m not sure if this is the actual house
I’m sure that the house is probably this one over here let me just get my fax up really quick but jenny wade was actually a civilian she was the only civilian to get killed in the gettysburg civil war fight she was as you can see she’s here
Holding a piece of bread she was making dough in her house when a bullet went through the doors and killed her so that’s why she is significant as the only civilian casualty as far as i’m aware there was another civilian that fought in the war
But he did not die until a few years later he was an older guy forget what his name was but this is pretty cool so let’s just go down this road a little bit and check out a little bit of the town without getting hit by a car hopefully
Go through this gas station here the roads are a little bit weird here very hilly hilly okay oh very old-timey i’m sure this is not what it looked like back in the day but there’s a lot of gift shops and little stores i’m sure there’s tons
Of places you can eat at oh another thing i wanted to say was that during the course of the video you’re going to hear a lot of talk about the union and the confederates because those were the two major sides in the war the union were the north the
Confederates were the southern states and the reason why gettysburg is so significant is because this is kind of the biggest war that’s ever happened in the western hemisphere and arguably some say that it is kind of what determined the outcome of who won the whole civil war sorry for the motorcycle
Here’s a cemetery they said strictly no skating in the cemetery so we’re going to respect that and not go in there but as i was saying it was kind of uh the deciding factor of who won the war and so that’s why it’s so significant the reason why the war kind of happened
Here a lot of people say different stuff but majority think that because gettysburg is right on the mason-dixon line well just a few miles above it and it was like it had a lot of roads running through gettysburg so that’s why the war ended up happening here because it was just the perfect
Combination of meeting grounds of the north and the south and so they ended up people want to say it was over shoes i don’t believe that we’ll get more into that later it’s a big i don’t know history is a funny thing again we’re talking about stuff that happened
Like over 140 years ago so a lot of time has passed and a lot of history has been lost but at the same time we do know a fair fair amount now a lot of people know gettysburg because of the gettysburg address that lincoln famously wrote and
Delivered i think it’s probably the most famous speech next to mlk’s but i’m not sure on that for reference actually people didn’t like abraham lincoln’s speech when he first delivered it because i don’t know if you guys heard the story but he wrote it on the train on his way up here
After the battle had finished and people didn’t like it because it was so short it was only around 200 i want to say 227 words it only took him a few minutes to even deliver the whole speech let me show you guys this guy’s not paying attention at all so many motorcycles
But anyways to give you guys a reference martin luther king’s i have a dream speech i think was somewhere in the ballpark of sixteen hundred one thousand six hundred words and abraham lincoln’s again was only 227. i hope i’m getting that number right i might have got it wrong but
Yeah so it was kind of a big you know shock when it wasn’t very long to a lot of people and here you can kind of start to see a little bit more of this is actually kind of an area where they fought at one point the union and the confederates so wow
The next part of this video is going to be with a very special guest his name is matt i just met him a little bit ago and he was nice enough to give us kind of a tour you guys will see all that but anyways i’m going to stop rambling we’re going
To get on to the second part of this video it’s gonna pick up all abruptly we’ll figure it out in editing all right so i’m here with matt matt he’s been helping me on my guide of gettysburg and i’ve heard rumors that the war was started over shoes is that
Hearsay the battle was started over shoes yeah that comes from a confederate general’s report and he wrote that after the battle obviously and he was coming into town with orders not to bring on a general engagement and so he brought on a general engagement he was he allowed himself to be lured into
A general engagement and so he was kind of breaking the rules a little bit well he didn’t know it right but yeah and so he uh later when he wrote his report i think and a couple of historic i get this from some historians i’ve spoken to the
Thought might be that he was trying to make it look like oh my poor boys were barefoot and hungry we were looking for shoes the reality was he just wasn’t being careful in my mind and uh they had shoes they were actually better clothed and fed than the union troops
Because they were they were all over pennsylvania without any opposition and they were just taking everything that they needed food equipment shoes everything so the confederates were in slightly better shape wow coming into gettysburg than the union was but that’s an old myth that’s part of the lost cause
The lost cause is a narrative that has perverted the civil war history for over a hundred years man this guy needs to do the tour man oh yeah and also he does uh youtube videos as well i’ll have a link in the description please check them out
If you want to know a lot better addressing gettysburg there you go dressing steady burger i’m gonna give you guys my little thing but look i’m not a historian i’m just a guy skating around so i’ll do my best oh thank you i appreciate it
By the way you should make a point that i’m not a guide he’s not a guide i just like he just does tours yes i just i run a tour company and i do a podcast but i’m not a god i’m not a historian i’m i’m no excellent if you get
Something wrong if you look if you get something wrong treat him like me because i don’t know anything okay i’m kind of lost on everything right exactly all right let you know that in the battlefield here itself we don’t allow rollerblading okay just bicycling
Okay you have to be on the trails if you want a rollerblade you can do it in town uh silly rule but we just don’t allow like well at least you admit it yeah it’s silly it really yeah all right guys thank you welcome back everybody uh sorry about
The shenanigans but we are in front of the pennsylvania memorial here at gettysburg what is uh what’s that about well this uh pennsylvania obviously we’re in pennsylvania um but pennsylvania has the second most number of troops uh in the battle to new york new york had the most number
Of troops um and uh this is put up to the men who fought from pennsylvania around you’ve got statues around the side you see lincoln he wasn’t from pa but he gave the gettysburg address and he was president and he’s kind of somebody that everybody likes so he’s up there you
Have governor curtin the governor of pennsylvania at the time and then some famous pennsylvania generals as you go around but what’s interesting is these bronze plaques here on the base have all the pennsylvania regiments and the full roster sheet of the guys who served in those regiments and then up at
The statue you have uh winged victory that is uh the goddess uh winged victory up there you guys can see that you could also go up to the top there’s a spiral staircase that leads you up there no kidding and we could go up there yeah there’s a eighth grade trip about three
Years ago it’s crazy that they have a staircase in here to begin with yeah it’s cool it smells like copper uh-huh wow it doesn’t even seem like there would be space up here but there is oh yeah oh you can even go outside wow this is a cool view right here okay wow
Wow how cool is that so they fought all along here yeah so if you look out in the distance way past the trees you see a little steeple yeah i see it the camera probably can’t i can but it starts out there and it goes north of town which you
Can’t see anything that’s north of town because of the hill that’s in front of us but it started out there and the confederates the union was on the defensive the confederates pushed them back after a good hard day of fighting and the union army started to rally and form a line as reinforcements
Were coming up on cemetery hill so the union army started to form a defensive line down this ridge and it looped around a cemetery hill and then it looped back down and made a straightaway down this ridge that we’re on and ended on big and little rounds on that final day
Yeah well right by the end of the battle that’s what the line looks like yeah it takes so they were really kind of all around this area at any given point right and do you think that it kind of mostly looked like this back then was it
Like open or was there a lot more trees do you think the park well it was a little more open than it is now but the park service has done a great job in the last say 15 to 20 years removing woodlots that weren’t here at the time of the battle
To bring it back to its 1863 appearance because they’re i don’t know what the the proper term is i can’t remember if it’s charter or whatever but when this park was started it was supposed to be so that a veteran could come back in a hundred years and
Recognize it know exactly where he is that makes sense i mean of course it’s never going to really be that way because in reality at the time these were all farms so this is everybody’s home yeah so these fields would be full of crops or animals
You have a lot of livestock around so it would be a little bit more different as far as what’s on the land but as far as what’s growing out of the land tree wise it’s basically what you would have seen then right well it looks like the field trip is caught
Up with us you ready to roll out let’s go All right so this is worth the brown’s battery it’s battery b first rhode island light artillery and they were actually positioned out in the field there a little bit more but there’s an interesting story with these guys and while they’re fighting on the third day of the battle
There’s a big canon eight before the culminating event in the battle known as pickett’s charge during this uh cannonade a shell a confederate shell explodes while one of these guns is being not one of these particular guns but a gun like this is being loaded and it explodes right in
This area in front of the muzzle of the gun this is called the muzzle the guy who’s loading with the rammer is standing you know by the front and there’s another guy assisting him with another duty and shell goes off it takes the one guy’s head off on the
Left side just the left half of his head is gone and sends him several yards flying in the air the other guy has his shoulder and a good chunk of his rib cage torn out to the point where they could actually see his lungs expanding and contracting as he breathes
And so but he still has the presence of mind and strength enough to come and sit down up against the wheel and as he’s sitting there against the wheel a sergeant comes over and you know gets his last wishes and all that other stuff and blah blah blah it’s a sad
Story but we don’t have time for that right now the interesting part of the story is the other damage that the sheldon was to put a dent in the muzzle right so when before the shell went off the guy was loading the powder bag the powder bag is already down in here
When the shell goes off he’s loading the ball the ball gets stuck because of the dent can’t go any further down but because the gun was over just to get into the good part because the gun was overheated as it cooled it started to fuse around
The ball and they couldn’t get the ball out and so that cannon was useless now and it sat it was sent eventually to the rhode island state house where it sat in the lobby or fourier or whatever the hell you call it for 100 years and in the 1960s they’re given a tour
They called it the gettysburg gun you can see it with the ball still sticking out there and somebody smart enough on the tour raises his hand and he says so does that mean that the powder is still in the barrel and they said yeah
And then you go so you’ve got a big bomb sitting in the lobby of of the state house wow and so they realized holy crap you’re right and so they had to defuse it and everything see i think you can still see the gettysburg gun i don’t know if it’s still in the
State house but you can still see it somewhere and it doesn’t have powder in it now so it won’t explode on you thank goodness that’s great yeah also look like this huh well so this is a different model of gun and different circumstances to why this
Is in here but if you just want to get a visual for what uh a muzzle looks like with the bulb jammed in it is there any gunpowder in the back of that i hope not we’re back oh look at that so that’s how it works
Oh i see that okay there’s the lens yeah that’s clever all right all right so we’re on the field of pickett’s charge and uh we’re looking south roughly and to our right in the tree line is the confederate line to our left up on the ridge there where all the
Monuments are and the cannon which you probably can’t make out in the video but you can see the obelisk uh that’s the union line and then that white car at two white cars ish are going down the emmitsburg road and that’s going to play an important part in the battle here later on
But uh on july 3rd somewhere early afternoon robert e lee orders a cannonade a bombardment of the union position in order to soften the defenses of the union line and um that goes on for about an hour there’s about 150 guns both sides that are arrayed and firing at each other um
It’s the biggest artillery bombardment on this continent and uh some say and i don’t believe this but some say it could be heard in philadelphia oh wow i say that’s malarkey but whatever you never know there’s stranger things that have happened i guess in the world anyway after the bombardment is over
Lee’s infantry comes out of the woods now it’s called pickett’s charge but the overall commander was general longstreet and pickett’s division which was about 65 6400 men if i’m not mistaken they are joined by two other divisions under the command of trimble and pedigree and those divisions were heavily engaged
On the 1st of july and they have a lot of walking wounded in their ranks which means they were wounded but not badly or not bad enough that they cannot go back to service so um they’re not in the best shape and they’re going to be in the field right
In front of us here those two divisions are going to come straight out from those trees to our immediate right and just come straight across pickett on the other hand his division i don’t know can you see that uh farm uh equipment there that’s causing the dust
Out in the distance i don’t know if the people in the in the video can watch it but a good distance out pickett’s division is a raid some of his brigades are in the fields actually two i believe are in the fields using the reverse slope of a ridge for cover
And then another brigade is in the woods however the guys that are using that reverse slope for cover they’re using it for cover from the union artillery but it provides no cover from the blazing sun up ahead so pickett’s division all the way out there by the dust cloud
Has to close the gap i think the gap i read was about 700 800 yards wide and so they’ve got to close the gap so that the left of his division is shoulder to shoulder with the right of the divisions here okay um that’s some fancy footwork to do with
6 500 men under fire but somehow they’re able to do it and they do unite somewhere just before the emmitsburg road there and then they cross the road which has fences up and so that means they have to climb the fences or if there’s a break in the fence then they all funnel
Through there but whatever they’re now in range of union muskets so let’s back up when they come out of the woods they’re immediately in range of union cannon and so the cannon starts to do a number by the time they get to the road they’re in range of the muskets thousands of
Muskets are going off at once sending lead flying out into the field into the fences and into the bodies of these men um a good few hundred maybe a thousand fifteen hundred or so actually make it over the road and get up to the wall that the union troops are behind
Only about 200 of them make it over the wall and those guys are either killed or captured or wounded um and then the rest retreat they fall back some said that they walked backwards all the way across the field because they didn’t want to be shot in
The back and they didn’t you know because not because it’s more painful but because uh then if word ever gets home that you were shot in the back they’ll assume you were running and you don’t want to be thought of as a coward back home this is
Back in the days when men were supposed to be men right and not whatever i’m not getting political i’m just saying i’m including myself like i’m a wimp too like i just i couldn’t handle it so um these guys were uh they were of a different sort than
What we are today is what i’m trying to say to you um so anyway battle ends there’s about 10 to 12 000 i i kind of lean around 12 000 troops that were involved in the attack so on the confederate side they had about 12 000 troops what i’m trying to
Say 50 of them are going to be casualties and here’s an important thing that everybody at home should remember when you study the war uh whether it’s the civil war any war um the word casualty does not mean killed it means killed wounded and missing and so there’s
50 of those men are killed wounded or missing um and that happened right out here on this field wow incredible incredible look you did that story justice i would not have been able to come up with any of that stuff at all how do you know i did it just i
Could have been making the whole thing he’s lying to us he’s lying i might have forgotten some things and mixed them up nah really cool stuff i i’m sure everybody viewing at home really appreciates the solid historical facts well they better because i’m very thirsty my mouth is dry
And i’m running out of water Alrighty guys well that was gettysburg pennsylvania huge huge huge huge thank you to matt this video would not have been as insightful and entertaining without him so please i what is that it’s our logo addressing oh there you go addressing gettysburg please check out his channel his content
His podcast all the links will be in the description please i’m sorry we couldn’t sorry to interrupt you but i’m sorry we couldn’t show you more of the battlefield but this guy had a roller blade because i really don’t allow roller blade it’s a new rule but i know
That it’s all good um but yeah thank you guys again thank you for watching shout out to all the members like the video if you like the video we have more videos in the playlist below and that’s it peace out Me Don’t forget to ring that notification bell
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