I toured the battlefield a couple of years ago, and found it an awesome experience. I was unprepared for the vast number of memorials that exist, most erected by individual companies and states whose soldiers fought and died there. To stand atop Little Round Top and look down on the steep slope that led up to it over which Confederate troops threw themselves in repeated assaults is sobering. And to stand in the treeline where Pickett's Charge began and look up to the distant copse and fence line that was the charge's objective gives one some sense of the courage of those men and those armies.
Yes. Little Hawk, I put the slavery comment in my pipe and tried to smoke it, but I couldn't get it lit. In that regard, my country was certainly born with a streak of hypocrisy in its character. Took a war to deal with it.