America’s Great and Growing Divide

Funny place to find oneself on Super Tuesday as the fog lifts, this ridgeline of hillocks and dips overlooking a broad swathe of pastures, fences and narrow tracks in the rolling ground of rural Pennsylvania. This is where they say — well, some say — the South’s defeat was sealed and with it two more years of slow retreat, defeat and bloody ruin. This southern aspect of Little Round Top (above — look closely, they are bodies amid the rocks) is the most visited site on the Gettysburg Battlefield’s monument-studded national park, the slope where Joshua Chamberlain famously led the 20th Maine in a death or glory bayonet charge. That was 159 years ago, when America was last at war with itself.

Gettysburg, about as far north as the Confederacy ever reached, is 1700 miles from Palmito Ranch in Texas, on the Mexico border, where the very last names were added to the 600,000-odd who perished in five years of settling irreconcilable differences. It was an easily appreciated divide…