A Gettysburg War Ballad
Gettysburg is widely regarded as the turning point of the American Civil War and the bloodiest battle ever fought on North American soil, with roughly 50,000 casualties on both sides over three days of fighting. The climactic moment came on July 3 with Pickett's Charge: roughly 12,500 Confederate soldiers crossed nearly a mile of open ground under artillery and infantry fire, in a frontal assault that ended in slaughter and marked the definitive failure of the Confederate invasion of the North.
After Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee's Confederate army never again fully regained its offensive strength: the battle, together with the fall of Vicksburg on the very same day, is regarded by historians as the moment the war's final outcome began tipping irreversibly toward the Union.
The Bloody Hopes ballad centers on a single gesture — raised hands — to tell Gettysburg not through the strategy of generals, but through the individual instant a soldier stops fighting: surrender, a plea for mercy, or simple human exhaustion in the face of violence that has outrun any possible heroic meaning. It's the same narrative register that runs through the project's whole catalog: great History seen from below, from those who endured it.