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.
First I have ever heard of the defeated being able to control the press of the victorious.
BIAS ALERT: Assume this is true for a moment. They state that the fee blacks were "kidnapped and herded south". Then they refer to the 'pogrom.' Which was it? A slaughter or an organized kidnapping?
Chattanooga sealed it.
Once U.S. Grant took Vicksburg, and then was placed in overall command, the question was only "when" the north won, not "if".
It was U.S. Grant's victories in the western theater that decided the war, the eastern theater simply garners more attention. One was a true "theater" of war, the other was simply a series of indecisive battles taking place over a less than 100 mile stretch of ground.
I recently got a copy of the Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference. Does not even address Blacks in the South despite documented evidence and accounts. I'm still reading thru it.
I would beg to differ. That is exactly what it is.
I am willing to concede that southern troops rounded up Blacks, both free and escaped. This probably occurred rarely since 90% of the war was fought in the south. But the article itself is contradictory, since it says they were kidnapped and then they say it was a 'pogram.'
Since a pogram refers to a massacre or a holocaust type of mass killing, they would not have been doing both.
Why would the south expend energy and resources to kill in mass Blacks? Especially since to the south, the blacks were property from which they could make a profit.
From dictionary.com:
"Pogrom: An organized, often officially encouraged massacre or persecution of a minority group, especially one conducted against Jews."
I'd say that mass kidnappings into forced servitude qualifies as a persecution.
Wrong. Read the definition in post #12 again - or are you parsing the word "OR" here...
From Thorndike-Barnhart World Book Dictionary:
pogram- an organized massacre, especially of Jews.
I have never seen 'pogram' used in any other way. If we accept the definition, which you quoted, then the following sentence would be true:
Following the victory over the south, the north launced a pogram against the defeated states, symbolized by the now infamous, 'carpetbaggers.'
That would be the author of the original Christian Science Monitor article, O'Brian. It is not clear if Sears and McPherson also used the phrase, which I and my dictionary agree is a distortion of the use of the word.
The Valley of the Shadow: Living the Civil War in Pennsylvania and Virginia
20,000 pages from 8 newspapers, dairies, maps, official records etc. One account of the battle of Gettysburg is : Diary of Reverend Abraham Essick.
Just because you haven't heard it used, doesn't mean it isn't a valid use of the word. Pogroms were not just extermination campaigns, but were also used to drive populations out and provide slave labor in Russia.
Is it a loaded term? Sure, but it still is valid. Is it evidence of the author's bias? Maybe an indicator. Nevertheless, the author is not accusing the Confederates of genocide, but of mass kidnapping into slavery of free blacks.
Following the victory over the south, the north launced a pogram against the defeated states, symbolized by the now infamous, 'carpetbaggers.'
You could also write something like: "Following the defeat of the Slavocrats, Southerners founded the K.K.K. to promote pogroms against the former slaves."
There's plenty of ugly history to go around.
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