More Eyewitness Accounts from Gettysburg Militia Occupation on July 4

The Journal of the Civil War Era has four blog posts this week on the descent of heavily armed “militias” and racist groups on Gettysburg on July 4. The armed mob was mobilized by a hoax perpetrated by a notorious internet troll. More on him later.

The first essay comes from historian Scott Hancock of Gettysburg College. Hancock posted himself on the battlefield to discuss the Civil War with the “militiamen.” You can get a sense of these encounters in this video:

Here is an excerpt from Professor Hancock’s blog post:

In 2020 an armed woman said she would kill anyone she saw burning a flag. People with what appeared to be AR-15s spread out around us in flanking maneuvers. At the Virginia monument, people yelled at me and my friend Clotaire Celius, who is clearly much darker-skinned than me and my, as Caroline Randall Williams might call it, rape-colored skin, to go back to Africa, and to go get our welfare checks, and of course they employed the N-word. People told Jimmy Schambach and his father Jim, and Gavin Foster, my three white friends who came out to help, that white people like them made them sick. My friend Shawn Palmer, a black retired state trooper and more accustomed to always scanning his surroundings, observed one man at the Mississippi monument as he slowly walked up behind me and put his hand on the gun in his belt. People took pictures of our license plates. The bikers refused to drive by us, waiting until we finally pulled out, and then followed us for two and a half miles, riding nearly right onto Shawn’s bumper. A few hours later, one of them followed Shawn again. Soon after that, in the National Cemetery, about a half hour after armed men and their sympathizers forced out a white local pastor wearing a BLM shirt, Clotaire and I walked in. We were unaware of the pastor’s experience. An older white man holding an American flag lectured us about how we black people had a lot of problems and needed to fix ourselves. When I asked him if white Americans should do likewise among themselves, he—no doubt emboldened by the one hundred or so white people around the only two black men in the cemetery—said no. We walked off mid-lecture. As Clotaire then astutely observed, “Why are they so afraid of two black men? They have guns. We have phones.”

Peter Carmichael, who heads the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, also went to the battlefield that day. Here is an excerpt from his description:

To be surrounded by men and women in festive patriotic attire and jungle fatigues, and holding a range of rifled weaponry was not how I expected my protest to end on July 4th. For much of the day my conversations with members of the Alt Right were uninteresting and largely forgettable. I was with my colleague Scott Hancock and a few other individuals in what can best be described as a teach-in at Gettysburg National Military Park. We came with signs that stressed the centrality of slavery to the Confederacy and posters that acknowledged the role of the enslaved on the battlefield. Nothing in my nearly 35 years of doing interpretation at Civil War sites, where I have encountered zealous defenders of the Confederacy, prepared me for the crowd of right-wing extremists who descended upon Gettysburg.  They were not the Lost Cause disciples of your parent’s generation.

The Washington Post says it figured out the troll behind the Gettysburg “Antifa Flag Burning Hoax of 2020.” You can listen to the story of how they figured out that it was a coach-surfing pop-punk promoter who does this sort of thing pretty often.

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