Gettysburg The last invasion

The sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg has generated an array of new books and articles, but few will have the impact of this title by Gettysburg College professor Guelzo. By dusting off some old debates for new scrutiny, he reinvigorates the discussion of the Battle of Gettysburg, already the topic of many monographs over the decades. As the title suggests, Guelzo characterizes Lee's Pennsylvania campaign as a true invasion of the North, with the goal of ending the war. The subsequent campaign featured mistakes leading to lost opportunities as well as questionable command decisions by both respective commanders, Robert E. Lee and George G. Meade. Guelzo provides a suitable prelude and a postscript to the battle, as well as comprehensive (but not overwhelming) descriptions of the clashes between the two armies. In addition, he presents plenty of biographical information about each major participant mentioned in the book to facilitate understanding of the motivation for their actions, although his consistent use of political bias to explain Union command decisions is perhaps overdone. His research is impeccable, and the book contains a suitable number of maps and diagrams to complement the text. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. S. J. Ramold Eastern Michigan University

THE battle of Gettysburg was a human and environmental catastrophe and, for the United States, almost the beginning of the end of its existence. Any historian contemplating this event faces numerous daunting problems - apart from the fact that thousands of books and articles have already been published on the Gettysburg campaign. The ghastly scale of bloodletting has to be explained. The battlefield contest itself involved the highest possible political and national stakes. And although this may be the most documented battle ever, the historian must use a vast supply of unreliable postwar recollections as sources. Such issues never stem the tide of writers drawn by the intellectual challenge (or by the charms of the subject's market). Spread over 15 square miles around a small Pennsylvania town on the first three days of July 1863, involving more than 160,000 soldiers and huge numbers of camp laborers, including between 10,000 and 30,000 slaves forced to serve the invading Southern army, the conflagration caused a degree of slaughter like no other in American history. The Union and Confederate armies officially reported a combined 5,747 dead, 27,229 wounded and 9,515 captured or missing over 72 hours of fighting. Of those wounded, approximately 14 percent died in gruesome impromptu hospitals over the next few months. In his graphic and emotionally affecting "Gettysburg: The Last Invasion," Allen C. Guelzo, a distinguished Lincoln scholar who teaches at Gettysburg College, offers an extraordinarily detailed and realistic account. Guelzo quotes a New York soldier's remembrance, and thereby demonstrates the challenge any military historian faces: "The reality of war is largely obscured by descriptions that tell of movements ... of armies, of the attack and repulse, of victory and defeat. ... All this leaves out of sight the fellows, stretched out with holes through them, or with legs and arms off." Guelzo rises above the carnage and makes clear that in Robert E. Lee's invasion, which threatened Northern cities like Washington and Philadelphia, everything - "the whole war" - was at stake. If Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had decisively defeated (and it nearly did) George G. Meade's Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, and sent the Northerners into yet another devastating retreat, some version of Confederate victory could have been achieved that summer. With that, we can only imagine how much of American, and even world, history might be different. Guelzo tries to hold these two subjects - three desperate days of combat and the political meaning of the war - in workable tension. Amid the numbing detail about generals' personalities, Guelzo provides some beguiling accounts of the political divisions and rivalries between the officers of the two armies. Both staffs were divided houses, with Lee's corps commanders as well as line officers largely split between Virginians and non-Virginians and between those who had embraced secession and those who had not. The Union Army's officer corps exhibited even more conflict between the "McClellanites," Democrats devoted to the discredited and fired George B. McClellan, who sought a limited war that would never threaten the racial order, and those Republicans of a New England antislavery stripe who really did believe the war must destroy slavery. Guelzo's primary interests, though, are the hour-by-hour waging of this battle; the lower-ranking officers who really fought and died in it; the geography of the green hills, rocky ridges and small springs; and, oddly, those "everlasting and immovable" post-and rail-fences of the freesoil farmers of Pennsylvania. Guelzo maintains that those fences truly stymied Confederate commanders and charging foot soldiers, and were instrumental in determining the outcome. Moreover, Guelzo reveals the sheer confusion of Civil War battles; commanders desperately lacked information about the locations and intentions of their enemies, even sometimes of their own divisions. He quotes Meade insisting that battles are "often decided by accidents." The tide of conflict, especially on the second day, was often a "directionless murk," Guelzo writes. In what becomes a central theme of his narrative, the battle is suddenly punctuated time and again by "miracle moments," when Union troops appear in the nick of time to narrowly save a position at Little Round Top, on Cemetery Ridge or Culp's Hill. Guelzo is no Lee lover; indeed, he leaves Lee largely out of the story, except for arguing that it was his failure to coordinate his generals that caused his defeat. Lee "lost a battle he should have won," Guelzo writes, even calling the Marble Man "shameless" in blaming his own troops for the loss. Meade fares no better; he was ineffective, almost "entirely reactive" and far too cautious. Guelzo denies that the Civil War was either "total" or the first "modern" war. This was 19th-century warfare, he asserts, with the highly inaccurate, if destructive, rifled musket the new weapon of choice. As for artillery, it does seem a moot point to the decapitated victims of solid shot or to those obliterated beyond identification by canister shells to say that Civil War technology was "neither sufficiently accurate nor sufficiently destructive to wreak the kind of obliteration which Krupp guns and aerial bombings would visit on European cities and towns in the 20th century." The blood spread all over the Gettysburg landscape was unparalleled by the standards of the time, whether the product of "modern" technology or not. While admitting the serious limitations of soldiers' postwar reminiscences, Guelzo, with exhaustive research, nevertheless relies on the mass of retellings embedded in regimental histories, memoirs and letters collected from survivors. This helps him make sense of combat, especially its horrific sounds and the smells of its aftermath. To the familiar question, how could those men stand and fight - in the "elbow-to-elbow line" - under such fear and gunfire, he provides a simple answer. Regiments were held together by trust as much as by leadership: "The Civil War soldier needed to know one thing above all others - that the men on either side of him would not run." This book's considerable achievements, though, are marred by Guelzo's literary style, as well as by his apparently irresistible romantic urge to add one more panegyric to the epic of Gettysburg. His claim that military historians have to struggle for respect among the "Civil War's cultured despisers," that a book like his violates "fashion" because it is not about the "agency" of black emancipation, seems unnecessary at best. (He and I have differed on this point before.) And the gems of detail from Guelzo's keen researcher's eye (he tells, for example, of a Roman Catholic priest standing on a rock offering absolution to the silent soldiers as they file into battle, bands playing to raise morale during combat, a Confederate general desperately breaking his sword on the ground as he surrenders) often pale next to the array of recorded descriptions of how soldiers were shot, where bullets penetrated their bodies or those of their horses - "through the left lung," "entered the left side of the stomach, perforating his sword belt and lodging in the spine" and the like. Such passages seem awkwardly clinical when overused, even if garnered from a soldier's remembrance. THERE are other problems with Guelzo's language as well. What does it mean for a full division of infantry to get a "collective bloody nose," or a brigade to have its flank "slapped." After portraying such "sheer carnage," why term this deadly affair a "gigantic boxing tournament gone wildly into three-digit extra rounds?" The historian John Keegan calls this kind of rhetoric the "Zap-Blatt-Banzai-Gott im Himmel-Bayonet in the Guts" style of military history. Guelzo appropriately ends his book with Abraham Lincoln's journey to Gettysburg to deliver his famous address on Nov. 19, 1863. With some effective if overwrought prose, he interprets the speech as Lincoln's defense of liberal democracy and self-government - the cause somehow worth all the sacrifice. By invoking the label "the tall man," rather than Lincoln's name, 10 times in his final few pages Guelzo may have been modeling the great historian Bruce Catton, who used the phrase deftly and beautifully, but only once, in writing so lyrically of the same event in his 1952 Civil War volume "Glory Road." If so, Guelzo should have channeled Catton even more. David W. Blight's latest book is "American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era." He is writing a new biography of Frederick Douglass.

*Starred Review* Few battles provoke debate like Gettysburg, whose bibliography exceeds 6,000 items. One more won't settle the what-ifs, but Guelzo's entry identifies key controversies, trenchantly advocates its interpretations, and rests on a sensible foundation, the confusion of a Civil War battle. A noisome cacophony opaque with smoke, the Gettysburg battlefield allowed officers and soldiers only fragmentary glimpses of the action, limiting their situational awareness to their immediate surroundings. Wary, moreover, of postwar memoirists' tendencies to justify themselves or fault others, Guelzo constructs his Gettysburg as much as possible from contemporaneous sources like orders, reports, and letters. His result reads like the battle might have been experienced, as an episodic series of terrifying minibattles directed by colonels and fought by regiments, whose clashes guided the outcome more than anything done by the respective army commanders on the scene. Rather dismissive of Union general Meade, Guelzo derogates Confederate general Lee less for his decisions at Gettysburg than for failing to strategically arrange a defensive battle and falling into the offensive one that developed. A political historian of the Civil War (Lincoln and Douglas, 2008), Guelzo demonstrates versatile historical skill in this superior treatment of Gettysburg.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist

Esteemed Civil War scholar Guelzo (Lincoln and Douglas) delivers a dense, impressively detailed account of the Civil War's turning point and bloodiest battle. Beginning shortly before the days of the actual engagement, his tome explores all aspects of Gettysburg as a military endeavor and the events that led to it. He addresses politics within the Union and the Confederate governments and armies, the personalities of major players and units, and places all within a greater historical and global context. Guelzo's beautiful prose transforms straightforward facts into a visceral, if gruesome, picture of the time and place (depictions of the injured and dead are as detailed as the discussions of military or political strategy), and supplementary maps and photographs aid visualization. Even while presenting the smallest details Guelzo contributes to a greater understanding of complexities of the battle and the Civil War as a whole-of particular note is a soldier's memory of opposing army bandsmen simultaneously playing "Home, Sweet Home" one night across the banks of the Rappahannock River from one another. While the sheer length and level of required engagement with the text make it not for everyone, readers who are willing to dedicate the time to read it will find this book enriching and enlightening. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In the two-and-a-half decades after the battle of Gettysburg, the Union veterans who survived to tell the tale were nearly unanimous in the declaration that the key to the battle depended on holding one very important hill. The puzzle for most modern students of the battle is why, with one consent, those veterans seemed to choose the wrong hill. For the present generation of battlefield tourists, the most important hill on the battlefield is the cone-shaped moraine known as Little Round Top. Oddly, this was not the name by which it was known at the time of the battle. People referred to it variously as Wolf's Hill, Sugar Loaf, or simply the "rocky hill," and after the battle, John B. Bachelder (who set himself up almost at once as the official chronicler of Gettysburg) tried to fix the name "Weed's Hill" to it, in honor of the most senior Union officer killed there during the battle, Stephen Weed. But Little Round Top it became, and Little Round Top it stayed, although even then it played a strictly back-seat role in the imaginations of the battle's veterans. It was not until the 1890s when curiosity began to shift in Little Round Top's direction, and not for another eighty years - after Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels - that Little Round Top suddenly blossomed into the key to the entire battle. From that point, and up through the Ronald Maxwell movie epic, Gettysburg, Little Round Top was transformed into "the key of the field in front beyond a doubt," and popular historians upped the ante to the point where "they saved the Union at Little Round Top." In particular, it has been Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine's last-chance bayonet charge on Little Round Top on July 2nd which have taken most of the laurels for guaranteeing that salvation. Certainly, the stand of the 20th Maine makes for great drama in the midst of great drama. As the left-flank regiment of Col. Strong Vincent's four-regiment brigade, Chamberlain's 20th Maine held off at least two major rebel infantry attacks in their front that afternoon, and then, when their ammunition was virtually gone, fixed bayonets and charged downhill, surprising and scattering the rebels. It was a beau geste straight out of the story-books. The fact that Chamberlain had, only a year before, been an unheralded professor of rhetoric at Bowdon College made the charge all the more amazing: an amateur, in command of amateurs, somehow made not only the right call, but the most daring call that could have been made, and succeeded. Chamberlain's story appealed to that deep streak of American self-reliance--that confidence in improvisation, that can-do spirit that trumps overly-intellectualized and hidebound European ways of doing things. That Chamberlain was a highly-intellectualized individual himself was beside the point. It takes nothing away from the tenacity of the fighting - the last-minute arrivals, the desperate and sometimes hand-to-hand combat, the just-in-time swing and flow of the action - to say that the drama of Little Round Top has been allowed to run away with the reality. But looked at coldly, the real credit for defending Little Round Top belongs less to Chamberlain and the 20th Maine, and more to three others who have largely faded from attention: Gouverneur Warren, the Army of the Potomac's chief engineer, who spotted rebel infantry swarming in the direction of the otherwise undefended hill and sent off gallopers to beg or borrow any troops they could find...Strong Vincent, who took his professional standing in his own hands, brought his brigade up to Little Round Top without authorization from his division commander, and organized its defense...and Patrick O'Rorke, who also bolted at Warren's call and brought his 140th New York up and over the crest of Little Round Top just in time to shove an even more serious Confederate attack back down the slopes. Unhappily, O'Rorke was killed in the charge and Strong Vincent was shot through the groin and died after four days of suffering. Gouverneur Warren would outlive the battle, only to be pilloried for misconduct at Five Forks in 1865. That left Chamberlain as the best candidate for laurel-wearing. And he was not an unworthy candidate, either. He would survive three wounds in 1864 (one of them near-fatal), win the Congressional Medal of Honor, end the war as a major-general, serve four terms as governor of Maine and as president of Bowdoin. Even more important, he would publish at least seven accounts of Little Round Top, giving himself the starring role, and giving Little Round Top the starring role in the battle as the last extension of the Union Left flank. Other veterans of Vincent's brigade were not impressed: "Chamberlain," complained Porter Farley of the 140th New York, "is a professional talker and I am told rather imaginative withal." And the truth is that Chamberlain's charge was only one of several such spoiling attacks that day, and Little Round Top was more of an outpost than the real flank of the Union line. It was the ex-professor's considerable flair for self-promotion which vaulted him ahead of the others. Nor is it entirely clear that Little Round Top quite deserved the role Chamberlain attached to it. The puffing of Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine is a subset of the larger problem of glamorizing Little Round Top itself. Charles Hazlett, yet another forgotten player on the hill that day who manhandled his six 10-pounder Parrott rifles "by hand and handspike" up through the tangled trees and underbrush of the hill, warned Gouverneur Warren that Little Round Top didn't afford much in the way of an artillery platform. The cone of the hill crested in a narrow spine which offered very little room for the deployment of artillery, and only permitted a line of fire facing west. Both Warren and Hazlett agreed that Little Round Top "was no place for efficient artillery fire--both of us knew that." Hazlett only took the trouble to get up there because he hoped that "the sound of my guns will be encouraging to our troops and disheartening to the others." Defending Little Round Top may even have endangered more than it protected the Union position at Gettysburg. The great Confederate attack on July 2nd had never been designed to seize Little Round Top in the first place; the plan laid down by both Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet was to swing a gigantic, curling blow up the Emmitsburg Road into the rear of Cemetery Hill, and brush past the "rocky hill." When Gouverneur Warren began pulling, first Vincent's Brigade, then O'Rorke's regiment, then the balance of Stephen Weed's brigade, up to Little Round Top, he was actually subtracting units which were intended to reinforce the Union line along the Emmitsburg Road, and thus made it all the easier for James Longstreet's rebels to land the real blow of the afternoon. The Confederates who scrambled up Little Round Top were only there because they had wandered off-course during the attack, and probably would have made no difference to the overall outcome of events on July 2nd - except, of course, that they induced Union commanders like Warren to siphon-off troops which could have been used to shore-up the Emmitsburg Road. As it was, the thinly-spread Union troops along the Emmitsburg Road were crushed by Longstreet's sledgehammer, and the Army of the Potomac was nearly brought to its knees. Had Longstreet succeeded in seizing Cemetery Hill, we would today be blaming, rather than celebrating, Warren, Chamberlain and O'Rorke for allowing themselves to be distracted by a useless piece of rocky real estate. Because, in the end, it really was Cemetery Hill, not Little Round Top, which was the key, something the veterans of the battle attested to in the years after the war by making their pilgrimages to Cemetery Hill, not Little Round Top. Unlike the narrow spine of Little Round Top, Cemetery Hill was a broad, flat plateau, with the ideal elevation for the siting of artillery (which was, normally, 1% of the distance to the target and never greater than 7% of the distance) and plenty of back-space to accommodate limber chests, caissons, horse-teams and battery wagons. And although modern visitors to Cemetery Hill can get no idea of this because of the foliage that has grown up there since 1863, a four-negative panorama taken from Cemetery Hill in 1869 by the local Gettysburg photographers William Tipton and Robert Myers shows a dramatically uncluttered viewshed to the west, north and south. Cemetery Hill, in other words, constituted an artillerists' dream. It was enough "to make an artilleryman grow enthusiastic," wrote one Pennsylvania officer. "This high ground which dominated the town and the fields in all directions, save one" (to the east) gave to an artillerists' eye "an unobstructed view of the rolling country open and accessible to the fire of our guns." Even Confederate observers admitted that Cemetery Hill was "made, one might say, for artillery." So long as the Army of the Potomac held Cemetery Hill, it had a position from which its massed artillery could decimate any infantry Robert E. Lee attempted to throw at it - in fact, did decimate it during Pickett's Charge on July 3rd. And so long as it held Cemetery Hill, it also gripped the Baltimore Pike, the principal life-line to its railhead and supply base in Maryland. Losing Little Round Top would not have won the battle for Lee, or lost it for the Union. Cemetery Hill would have, though, which is why, after the battle, the Soldiers' National Cemetery was created on Cemetery Hill, why the first battlefield observation tower was built on Cemetery Hill, and why the first veterans' encampments were held on Cemetery Hill. It would take another generation to forget Cemetery Hill's importance, and the combination of a very gifted self-advertiser and a very gifted novelist to replace it with "the rocky hill." Excerpted from Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen C. Guelzo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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