Longstreet’s Attack from Seminary Ridge to the Rose Woods

This is an overview of a theoretical tour at Gettysburg focusing on Longstreet’s attack on the second day from Seminary Ridge to the Rose Woods. The three tour stops are the Mississippi Monument on West Confederate Avenue, the Peach Orchard, and photos of dead Confederate soldiers in the Rose Woods. After a brief overview of the attack, the paper introduces several questions raised by the historical landscape concerning the sense of history it conveys, how well the landscape currently reflects the experiences of soldiers, what drove soldiers to fight, and how the landscape expresses its own changing meanings. The paper then presents four main themes that will guide the tour: the significance of the attack, the tension between the pastoral landscape and the savagery of the battle, the role of Sentimental culture, and the use of photography. An analysis of each tour stop follows, using these questions and themes to provide a new level of complexity to the interpretation of the stops and to complicate the dominant narrative of Gettysburg