Tickets for the 147th Annual Gettysburg Reenactment are on sale at the American Civil War Museum Complex!  The event will take place July 2, 3, 4 & 5, 2010!  Your ticket includes:

• Exciting Battles 
• Live Mortar Fire Demonstrations
• Expansive Living History Village with all-day Activities
• Two Living History Activities Tents with continuous programs
• Large & Diverse Sutler Village 
• Enjoy a Variety of Delicious Food and Beverages

The American Civil War Museum Complex will offer articles from guests authors each month.  This month Steve Anderson is our guest author.  For more information about this or his work, visit www.GreatTalesLive.com.

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On Chambersburg Street, the day began with a clatter of hooves, the groan of wagon wheels, and the voice of a Confederate waking his fellows: "Get up!  Get up!  We are retreating!"

The Battle of Gettysburg was finally done.  Captain Samuel Russell wrote to his mother in Pottsville, PA, "Our success yesterday was most complete.  We repulsed the rebels at every attack....  The men are in splendid spirits."  And then, he noted the date: the Fourth of July.  "We have all got sixty-five crackers to celebrate the day with," he wrote.

The civilians were celebrating, as well.  At home on West High Street, Catherine Foster wrote, "The glorious Fourth of July.  The voices of the citizens were again heard greeting each other from their windows, as if they had been resurrected."

Her daughter Alice was helping the wounded, when she was asked to "come out and sing the 'Star Spangled Banner,' for the Rebels had gone."  She came to the door and saw "the last gray coat... going out the end of the street."  And then, "with thankful hearts, but too sad to sing," she and the other ladies went back to their patients.

Another Pennsylvania native, Lieutenant Charles Potts, wrote in his diary, "Glorious old Fourth, but cannot enjoy it much in my present position."  He had been captured, and was being marched from Gettysburg as a prisoner of war.  "Rebs retreating as fast as possible, through drenching rain," he continued.  "Long train of wagons, containing wounded rebels, household furniture, in fact anything, everything that they could carry off."

Long trains of wagons, indeed.  One, carrying the wounded, was seventeen miles long.  Another, carrying supplies and captured treasures, stretched more than forty miles.  They became the prize in a terrible skirmish at the top of South Mountain that night, the second-largest engagement in Pennsylvania, fought in the dark, in that same "drenching rain," on the treacherous Monterey Pass.

Three days later, President Lincoln spoke at the White House.  "How long ago is it?-eighty odd years" since that first Fourth of July, he said.  And now, on this Fourth, "the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal, 'turned tail' and run."  This is "a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech," he added, "but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion."  He would be prepared for that speech four months later-and he would come to Gettysburg to deliver it.