Coming to terms with Gettysburg

Gettysburg

Stephen W. Sears

Houghton Mifflin: 624 pp., $30

Hallowed Ground

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Hallowed Ground

A Walk at Gettysburg

James M. McPherson

Crown Journeys: 142 pp., $16

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Gettysburg Battlefield

The Definitive Illustrated History

David J. Eicher

Chronicle Books: 296 pp., $40

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The bloodiest battle of the American Civil War took place 140 years ago last week. The killing at Gettysburg, Pa., began early on the morning of July 1, 1863, and reached its climax on the afternoon of July 3. About 170,000 American soldiers fought there. And the Civil War was certainly not one of these newfangled virtual wars with a death count lingering in the low hundreds. At Gettysburg, what newspapermen of the time called the “butcher’s bill” amounted to 51,000 killed, wounded, missing or captured. The equivalent, using today’s population figures, would be 450,000 casualties in a single engagement. The popular notion that the battle was the Civil War’s one decisive turning point is off the mark. Still, the Battle of Gettysburg is the deadliest encounter in American history and the biggest military engagement fought in the Western Hemisphere. It is our Waterloo, our Stalingrad.

For all the battle’s scale and fury, Gettysburg’s mythological power overshadows its historical significance. The mythic Gettysburg is a ground zero where Americans come to terms with the meaning of the Civil War. It reveals how we remember -- and forget -- the most violent revolution in the life of the nation. The battleground is hallowed not only by epic heroism of the fighting men but also by the few long-remembered remarks that Abraham Lincoln made there that November.

As Lincoln suggested then the turning point of the Civil War was not a military engagement at all. That had occurred in September 1862, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, his “new birth of freedom,” the actual point at which the war and the nation were transformed. Slavery brought about the Civil War, and the war’s most important outcome, besides national survival, was slavery’s destruction. Yet oddly, slavery and its legacy of injustice have been largely banished from our culture’s memory of the war. And therein lies the origins of the new battle raging at Gettysburg National Military Park: Did these soldiers die in a war to end slavery or in a war between states’ rights and federal power?

Of course, exploring the role of Gettysburg in American memory is not the mission of either Stephen W. Sears’ or James M. McPherson’s books. Both are pegged to the 140th anniversary, which, not surprisingly, has augmented the already expansive library of Gettysburgiana. What distinguishes them is the stature of their authors. In “Gettysburg,” Sears offers the first definitive overview of the campaign in 35 years. “Gettysburg” is his fourth book on one of the major clashes of the eastern theater: Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia versus the Union’s Army of the Potomac. His first installment came in 1983 with “Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam,” a bestseller that was immediately recognized as one of the best accounts ever written of a Civil War battle. “Gettysburg” confirms his reputation as a master storyteller and a historian smart enough to keep the specialists happy. He gives us the sweep of the campaign -- from the early strategizing of the Confederate high command through the delivery of the Gettysburg Address.

McPherson approaches the subject on foot in “Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.” Much shorter than “Gettysburg,” “Hallowed Ground” is a pocket-size guidebook, an itinerary for battlefield tourists rather than a narrative for armchair historians. The text is apparently a verbatim transcript of a tour of the battlefield conducted by McPherson. One could ask for no better guide. McPherson may be the best-known living historian of the American Civil War. His 25 previous books include this generation’s finest one-volume survey, “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989.

War photography came of age in the Civil War. Exposure times were far too long to capture actual combat, but many thousands of shots survive of posing soldiers and regiments, camps and battlefields, steamship landings and railroad depots, and, most memorably, of dead men decomposing where they fell. Such period photographs constitute the main appeal of David J. Eicher’s “Gettysburg Battlefield,” by far the best of the several new Gettysburg coffee-table books.

The stakes were high in the summer of 1863. The Confederates had won some stunning victories in Virginia. However, the South was steadily losing the war in the West, an erosion that threatened to make success in Virginia irrelevant. And Lee was buying his tactical victories at a cost in blood that was bankrupting the South’s reserves of manpower. Fortune favors the bold, but Lee’s brand of boldness against long odds sometimes crossed into wholesale recklessness with the lives of his soldiers.

Yet the Confederates did possess one signal advantage in the otherwise unequal contest. For the North to win the war, it needed not only to defeat the Confederacy and crush its armies but also to occupy its territory and establish the freedom of its 4 million slaves. Whereas the Rebels didn’t have to defeat the United States, they needed merely to defeat Lincoln by persuading enough Northerners that the price of restoring the Union by force of arms was more than they could endure. The Confederates calculated that one more big win -- this time on Northern soil -- would drive home the hopelessness of Lincoln’s war. Lee himself predicted that Confederate success in Pennsylvania would ensure Democratic success at the polls: “Next fall there will be a great change in public opinion at the North. The Republicans will be destroyed & I think the friends of peace will become so strong that the next administration will go on that basis.” Lee had no doubt whatsoever about the outcome of his invasion of the North. He blandly told one of his generals how he planned to dispose of the Army of the Potomac. “I shall throw an overwhelming force on their advance, crush it ... and by successive repulses and surprises create a panic and virtually destroy the army. [Then] the war will be over and we shall achieve the recognition of our independence.”

Recent scholarship has tended to downgrade Lee’s military reputation, and Sears’ “Gettysburg” is no exception. He is outspoken in laying blame for the Confederate failure so squarely on the shoulders of the Southern commander. He believes that the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia was brought low at Gettysburg by its own arrogance. The Rebels underestimated Yankee skill and determination. While Sears advances it with fresh rigor, that explanation is hardly new. Not long after the shooting stopped, Lee admitted, “I thought my men were invincible.” The problem with invincible armies is that there are none.

Lee had taken command of the Virginia army in June 1862. During the next year, the opponents savaged each other in a series of ferocious battles, and the Army of Northern Virginia usually prevailed. In contrast, command of the Army of the Potomac turned over five times in the year since Lee’s appointment. Union corps commanders had played an unseemly game of musical chairs, with Lincoln calling the steps. At 3 a.m. on June 28, just four days before the fight at Gettysburg, Gen. George G. Meade was roused from an uneasy sleep to be told that he was Lincoln’s latest choice for commander in chief. It is doubtful that Meade got much more rest that night. “Here he was,” Sears writes, “newly appointed to command and abruptly so, leading a recently twice-beaten army of possible doubtful morale, confronting a recently twice-victorious army led by a daring opponent.”

So far, the campaign had gone the Confederates’ way. Lee’s boys pushed aside some feeble resistance and marched into the heart of Yankeedom. The hard-bitten veterans marveled at the richness of the Pennsylvania farms -- before hastening to subtract a share for themselves. The chronically hungry Southerners gobbled up all the “eatables” they could lay hands on. When a Pennsylvania farm wife complained to a Confederate corps commander, the officer agreed that it was “sad, Madame, very sad” but observed that Southern civilians had lived with such despoliations for two years. More sinister was an outbreak of freelance slave-trading. Confederates kidnapped hundreds of African Americans -- Northern free blacks and former slaves -- and sold them south for personal profit.

The great battle commenced when advance units blundered into each other in a classic “meeting engagement.” The collision came at Gettysburg mainly because a spider’s web of local roads converged there. At first, the Confederate winning streak continued. Rebel infantry routed the Federals from their lines north and west of Gettysburg and chased the survivors right through town. The bluecoats didn’t stop running until they reached some high ground to the south called Cemetery Ridge. The range of rock-strewn hills became the backbone of the Union defense that would beat back two days of all-out Confederate attacks.

The fall of darkness and fumbling by Southern commanders kept the Rebels from following up on their initial success. The Yankees, outnumbered the first day, rushed fresh divisions into the lines during the night. Dawn revealed Union trenches bristling with cannon and rifles.

Lee had come north seeking a tactical situation that would allow him to destroy the Army of the Potomac. This was not it. His second-in-command, Gen. James Longstreet, urged him to break off the fight and take a position between the Union army and Washington, D.C., which would have forced Meade into attacking Confederates behind their own well-chosen defensive lines. Lee would have none of it. By turns stubborn and, as Sears suggests, “strangely passive,” he insisted on renewing the offensive. On July 2, the Army of Northern Virginia hurled itself against the northern and southern ends of the Union line. Both sides fought with extraordinary courage and tenacity. “Confederates made some gains at great cost, but failed to achieve a breakthrough. Southern attacks had lacked coordination,” McPherson says, mildly observing: “The usual skills of generalship in the Army of Northern Virginia seem to have gone missing that day.” Assessing Yankee performance, he writes, “On the Union side, by contrast, officers from Meade down to regimental colonels acted with initiative and coolness.”

The second day’s setbacks did nothing to diminish Lee’s fixation on the war-ending victory that he still believed awaited on the crest of Cemetery Ridge. The Rebel commander did not even understand that his army had failed to crack the enemy’s defenses. “It was thus astonishing,” Sears writes, “how little General Lee knew of his own army, of the enemy’s army, and of the battlefield when he announced that his general battle plan was unchanged and that the attack would continue.” The battered, reeling Yankees, Lee was sure, were about to crumble. He would send his strongest divisions -- spearheaded by Gen. George Pickett’s Virginians -- smashing through the Union center, breaking their line and sending the whole Northern army into a panic-stricken retreat. Longstreet begged him not to make the attack. Lee was adamantine.

Pickett’s Charge on July 3 has often been depicted as the most glorious failure in the annals of American warfare. Contemporary witnesses described a spectacle that sounds about as glorious as the operations of a busy meatpacking plant. The exposed Rebels were shot to tatters by artillery and small arms. “Arms, heads, blankets, guns, and knapsacks were thrown and tossed into the clear air,” a Yankee colonel remembered. “A moan went up from the field, distinctly to be heard amid the storm of battle.” “I could hear the missiles,” said a Confederate colonel, “crashing through the bones of my men like hailstones breaking through glass.” It was all over in about half an hour. Lee had ordered 14,000 men to make the assault. Only half of them managed to stumble back. “All this has been my fault,” lamented Lee. “It is I that have lost this fight.”

The bleeding Confederates expected a Yankee counterattack. None came, either on July 3 or in the two weeks it took the Army of Northern Virginia to complete its retreat. Lincoln was bitterly disappointed that Meade did not destroy Lee’s army while it was stuck on the northern bank of the flood-swollen Potomac. Whether Meade really could have done so is the subject of a controversy that began in 1863 and shows little sign of abating. Lee escaped to Virginia. Ahead lay an additional two years of combat and 300,000 more dead, bringing the final butcher’s bill to 630,000 Americans lost.

Today Gettysburg National Military Park draws almost 2 million pilgrims every year. Two principles, evident in popular culture and at historical sites like Gettysburg, dominate the way we remember the Civil War. Neither is false, but both manage to sidestep the true meaning of that vast struggle. The first is a duty to honor the soldiers’ heroism. The second is a celebration of the reuniting of North and South in a brotherhood of white Americans that grows out of the killing fields of the 1860s. Missing is any mention of slavery -- the reason the men were killing each other in the first place. “This uniting of North and South in a renewed nationalism is a fine thing, to be sure,” writes McPherson, “but all too often it was characterized by forgetting what the war had been about.”

The war was about slavery and the fate of the African American people. Yet the history presented at Civil War sites has conspicuously avoided any mention of slavery. Until now. In 2000, Congress legislated that the National Park Service would broaden its interpretation to include discussions of slavery and the origins of the Civil War. The change has predictably outraged not only Confederate partisans but all those who would continue to deny the central place of slavery and race in American history.