By David Rutter
Events sometimes lasso your heart even when you can’t explain why you are a willing captive. You can’t even explain it to yourself.
So the reasons why I spent the first weekend of May five years ago – 24 hours of it in a car — driving there and back from Gettysburg, Pa., will be somewhat more complex than it seems at first.
As for specifics, I went to retrieve the last sapling to be grown from the Witness Tree, the honey locust that stands just up the hill from the spot where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Address.
America has sacred ground, much of it drenched in the blood of noble sacrifice. Except for Arlington National Cemetery, no place grips our soul more securely than Gettysburg.
In the summer and fall after the July 1863 battle, that tree was the last thing living on that hill, except for grass. The battle’s fury — gun powder, artillery, swords and bayonets—killed everything else. Lincoln came to explain why that price was necessary. You can see the outline of the lone tree behind Lincoln in the few surviving photos of the Address.
The battle toll was grisly — 23,049 casualties for the Union (3,155 dead, 14,529 wounded, 5,365 missing). Confederate casualties were 28,063 (3,903 dead, 18,735 injured, and 5,425 missing), more than a third of Robert E. Lee’s army.
The battle even claimed the lives of 1,500 horses. Though the cataclysms did not end the war, it guaranteed the South would never win.
I was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and now live in Illinois. So except for that presidential/Civil War/freeing-the-slaves thing, my life path is just like Abe.
The trip was as much to honor him as it was to retrieve a small living plant. You must decide what in life holds your affection. This is one of those touchstones for me.
For such a quest, you need friends to see you through. It helps if they understand you can’t quite offer easy explanations. My expedition was blessed with two partners – Jennifer Evans and Bruce Kile.
Evans, my co-pilot for 1,400 miles, is my true life love and the best friend that you’d hope to deserve in strange, inexplicable quests. Kile is a career forester and hometown Gettysburg historian who made the tree his life’s avocation.
As president of Historic Gettysburg Adams County, Kile raised and dispersed 1,600 honey locust saplings all across the Eastern United States three decades ago. All sprang from that one Witness Tree at the crest of that hill.
The since-ended honey locust project was a fundraiser for which the historical group realized $30 a tree. But the National Park Service strongly suggested the practice end. Pick up a leaf or twig on the grounds at Gettysburg if you wish, but government casts a dim view on making money from it, even if the result was well-intentioned. So now, no one officially preserves the Witness Tree. Many guard it unofficially and with a sense of guarded discretion.
And the little sapling wrapped in swaddling pads that sat in my car’s back seat all the way back from Western Pennsylvania is the last one. The very last one. When Lincoln surveyed the grounds that day and considered the terrible carnage, he likely would have looked to the hilltop to see the only thing left — the old tree.
Kile said I could have the surviving sprout if I came to pick it up. He could not trust commercial shipment. He had seemed as surprised when I telephoned him unannounced as I was that he answered the phone. “Come,” he said. You have to say yes to that.
The sapling was donated to an enthusiastic Chicago Botanic Garden and its botanists on behalf of my family for whom Lincoln history is an affection.
It’s likely the rarity will be enhanced because Kile’s decades of interest in the tree led him to discover how to pollinate and grow the seed independently from its natural growth cycle. In nature, the sweet seeds must be eaten and then excreted by an herbivore – usually a cow – to grow.
Kile unraveled a complicated process to replicate this process artificially. It is his secret.
The Chicago Botanic Garden’s scientists assured me that they hoped to raise the sapling to maturity. It is truly a legacy creature. The progenitor tree may be 300 years old. Though it survived storm damage and the ravages of pestilence, it is frail. Trees also die of old age.
That July was the 150th anniversary of the battle.
I stood beside the Witness Tree and touched the bark as Jennifer Evans took photos. Just down the hill was the spot where Lincoln spoke. Visitors gather there as pilgrims. No one pays any attention to the tree, which is just as well. The local historians know the tree well and are not eager to make it a national celebrity, even though they could.
Celebrity is the ugly burden of our era, and the fascinations of 21st century life are untempered by restraint and wisdom. Better to let the tree live in gentle obscurity than be swarmed by sightseers.
The ground around the tree is open and untrammeled. The ground needs to breathe freely to keep the honey locust alive.
Children and adult visitors stroll past, most of them only vaguely knowing what happened here, or how we are touched and shaped by so many legacies we hardly know exist. They visit the cannons and statuary, but they leave the old tree alone in its anonymity. To them, it’s just another old tree.
The graves of thousands of Civil War veterans ring the hill in neat semicircular patterns. Each Union grave is marked with a small, white-faced stone lying flat, snuggled into the ground. No names adorn the little white stones, only numbers. The notation on the stones is deliberately stark. Regardless of rank, they all paid the same price. They are equals. They are buried barely a few hundred yards from where they fell.
The moment touches your sense of reverence. You want the world to hush for just a moment and listen.
That’s because if one place can ever be said to have been sanctified with sacrifice, this is that place for Americans.
Plus, spring was near that week I visited. Cool breezes glide effortlessly over the hills. Even the elderly honey locust had tiny green leaves, whispering high up in its branches.
There was life here on this hill, after all, and rebirth. After briefly wondering if this much effort to save a little tree sprout was worth it, that moment in the Gettysburg cemetery answered the question.
I stood silently, and listened to the breeze.
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