Posted on 06/05/2003 6:01:44 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
July will bring the 140th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. Across Pennsylvania fields baking under the hot summer sun, reenactors will be out in force - most from the South, eager to replay, or imaginatively reverse, the whole encounter.
Reenactments began in 1913, a time closer to the battle than to us. But Gettysburg is a place that history embalmed as a special shrine long ago. What new could there be to say about it?
In the hands of two master historians, Stephen Sears and James McPherson, plenty, it turns out - though their books serve quite different purposes. McPherson's "Hallowed Ground" focuses on the battlefield today. Sears, whose "Gettysburg" will be published later this month, focuses on the battle, providing the best single-volume study in 30 years of what happened at Gettysburg from July 1 to 3, 1863.
"Hallowed Ground" is part of a series by Crown in which famous writers guide readers across their favorite landscapes. McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Battle Cry of Freedom," fulfills the task with a crisp but informative tour of key spots at the Gettysburg National Military Park. Using appropriate monuments as "stops," McPherson provides apt, moving commentary about personalities, controversies, and oddities connected with the battle. Among the last, he says, a body was found as late as 1997 with the skull shattered, just one of close to 8,000 fatal wounds suffered during the battle.
Sears and McPherson agree on a major point of controversy: The Southern strategy of attack, not defense, was commander Robert E. Lee's decision; the failure of several days of attacks was Lee's fault. In their view, that does not decrease his stature as the greatest general in American history. But both authors also explain that his greatness was his undoing: Lee began to believe in his army's invincibility.
Both writers put the illusion in context. Two months earlier, Lee had staged daring, high-risk attacks at Chancellorsville, which made him think his men could work miracles.
Sears quotes liberally from the diaries of many soldiers and the accounts of the foreign observers around Lee. (The Union had none; its only friend was Russia, which later sent naval squadrons as token support.) The English colonel, Arthur Fremantle, summed up the emotional situation best in noting that all the Confederates held their enemy in complete contempt.
Sears shows nothing was wrong with the Union army that a competent general couldn't cure. But it had been plagued with overzealous or overcautious commanders. A week before the battle, Lincoln found in George Meade someone who could keep his balance. Meade was sharp enough to find high ground and lash himself to it. For technological reasons, defense normally won Civil War battles, and Gettysburg was the ultimate proof. Sears also shows how the Federals benefited from dogged work by their officers and from stealing pages from the Confederate book, especially by doing the unexpected.
Both historians mention many heroes, but none compares to the superbly named Union Col. Strong Vincent and his subordinate Joshua Chamberlain, a Bowdoin professor who, when his 20th Maine regiment ran out of ammunition, naturally decided to charge. Chamberlain is now famous from the PBS series "The Civil War" and the Ted Turner film "Gettysburg." But Sears's full discussion makes you wonder if the US would still exist intact without Vincent, who died of his wounds soon after the battle.
Both Sears and McPherson bring to light unknown aspects of the Gettysburg campaign, chiefly involving the role of blacks. Black troops were not yet fighting for the Union, but a black farmer named Bryan owned acreage right in the center of the Union line. He judiciously departed before the fight, but got $48 in damages from the government afterward.
Indeed, free black men (many lived in southern Pennsylvania, near the Mason-Dixon line) had all evacuated. Free black women and children, both historians say, were kidnapped in droves by Confederates raiding nearby towns in the weeks before the battle. Declared "contrabands" in official orders, they were herded south. For varied reasons - chiefly the triumph of pro-Southern post-war history, or "Tara"-vision - this incident has been omitted from most accounts. But Sears and McPherson cite witnesses of the pogrom, such as the white diarist Rachel Cormany.
One wishes "Hallowed Ground" were longer; some might wish Sears had shortened his account - although its comprehensiveness pays off when he recounts the battle's climax - Pickett's charge - from a score of angles. Both Sears and McPherson have lived with this subject for a lifetime and have thought hard about communicating it as clearly as possible. Like 19th-century scholars, rather than modern or postmodern ones, they know citizens will respond to serious matter if given half a chance by lucid presentation. Sometimes, they show, writers succeed by staying behind the times.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't some Northern states completely bar blacks from living there up until the end of the Civil War? Also, didn't blacks serve in the Confederate Army along side white soldiers in intergrated units, not all black units like the Union's 54th Massachusetts of Battery Wagner, Charleston fame?
Also, didn't several Union states maintain slavery till after the Civil War?
Whoa there, Michael. I'm a born and bred Westerner, with a mostly detached view of both sides of the war. My point in all this is that: Yes the word is loaded and biased, but is still within the definition. Does the author have an axe to grind? Maybe; he doesn't appear totally objective.
OTOH, neither do you.
Does the fact that is was not directed at a minority make it excusable? Implying that the South's actions against Blacks was more vicious and more wrong, because it was racist in nature? So when Sherman's men raped 12 year old white girls, burned down their fathers farms and cut a swath of destruction 60 miles wide and 200 miles long, it was less of a crime because it was not directed at a minority?
Nope. Sherman's men committed atrocities too. His methods were despicable on occasion. But his purpose was to destroy the infrastructure (railways, farms, manufacturing) and morale that allowed the Confederate Army to continue to fight. It wasn't just "simple vengeance." As I said in another post: it was war at its most brutal. Rather like the actions of Quantrill's Raiders.
Personally, I don't subscribe to the excuse that because Side A did something terrible that it somehow mitigates the sins of Side B.
The only good thing to come out of the whole Civil War was the eradication of the cancer of slavery; but it was a brutal surgery without anaesthesia. It created deep scars and wounds that still fester.
And before any of you jump on me for that, I'm saying that was the only good OUTCOME, not the only CAUSE. Some fought to preserve the Union, some to defend their States. Some fought to maintain their "peculiar institution", some to "punish the traitors". Some motives were of high merit and some of low on BOTH sides.
I mostly stay out of these thread discussions because the partisans on both sides devolve into demonizing the other's heroes while writing hagiographies of their own.
Also, Warren's role at Gettysburg cannot be forgotten, either, as I believe it was he that actually took the initiative to place men on the Round Tops.
And, of course, it was "Hancock the Superb" who chose the ground, which is what ultimately defeated Lee.
Hancock is the most overlooked man in the entire war.
The definition I found is the following:
An organized, often officially encouraged massacre or persecution of a minority group, especially one conducted against Jews.
A pogrom can just be an officially encouraged persecution, so the behavior described in the article qualifies.
Drew Garrett
The real issue would have been dealing with the political fallout, and the northern press (who would have had a field day with it). It would have been a morale victory for the south, not much more. That might have had an equally detrimental effect on northern morale and resolve. Hard to say (if the Rebels took it and were quickly driven out, I doubt much would have come of it except a lot of clamor - however, if they had taken it and been able to hold on to it for a week or two, then the issue would be different).
I like speculating about the war. There's lots of "ifs" but in the end, wars turn on all the ifs, and thus things happen the way they happen. Mistakes are made, opportunities missed, the obvious is overlooked, etc.
They all got so full of themselves, and got so used to being up against incompetant Union commanders, that when they finally ran into people like Meade, Grant, Sherman, etc, they got sh!thammered.
Stuart's actions at Gettysburg are a perfect example of the south's belief in their invicibility. Lee's ordering Pickett's Charge is another example. He had come to believe that his men could do anything he asked them to.
Unfortunately for him, Winfield Scott Hancock was on the other side of that wall.
An organized kidnapping. This happened both times the Army of Northern Virginia invaded the North. In the words of one of the soldiers who was there:
"We took a lot of negroes yesterday. I was offered my choice, but as I could not get them home I would not take them." - William S. Christian, confederate officer, June 28, 1863
Say Pickett had split the Union line on the third day and sent the Union army into a retreat, then what? He still had one third of his army as casualties, had shot away almost all his artillery ammunition, and was hundreds of miles into enemy territory. His only option, win or lose, was the one he chose. He went home.
Re: 46 - what is becoming clearer?
That's one of the more persistant myths of the Gettysburg campaign, along with the one that Rhodes went to Gettysburg to rob a shoe factory. In fact, Lee retained half his cavalry with him while Stuart went off with the other half.
That oppression was felt after the war. In the 1840s and 1850s tariffs had been quite low. True, they were going to be raised, because of budget problems, but the increase would have been kept modest had not Deep South leaders, agitated by slavery already decided to split their party and then their country. Had they really felt that tariffs were their main interest and complaint, they could have kept the revision modest. Once war began, the tariff was further increased, and taxes increased in both the US and CS. I'd agree that tariffs were increased too much, and was wrong to maintain a protective tariff after the war when US industries were already fully on their feet, but it looks to me like high tariffs were more a result of sectional conflict, rather than their cause. An interesting "what if" is whether Lincoln would have dropped the tariff increase if Southern leaders had made clear that it was their main concern, but that didn't happen, because it wasn't. It's certainly arguable that if it had been, there would have been no party split, no President Lincoln, no war, and, for some time to come, no emancipation.
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