Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2 page)

The vagaries of postwar memory did not help this uncertainty. The 1,324 monuments, markers, statues, and plaques which dot the six thousand acres of the modern Gettysburg battlefield look like they ought to offer some reliable guidance to the placement of soldiers on the ground. But for a variety of reasons, even these fixed stars of the battlefield are not entirely to be relied upon. Veterans wishing to erect monuments to their stand frequently petitioned the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association for locations near the battlefield’s roadways, rather than where they actually fought, so that their monuments would be more easily visible to tourists (so that Freeman McGilvery’s artillery line is marked by placements along modern-day Hancock Avenue, some two hundred yards
east
of where they surely parked themselves in the desperate twilight combat of July 2, 1863). One unit’s veterans (those of the 72nd Pennsylvania) actually waged a successful battle in the Pennsylvania courts to have their monument placed on a spot which reflected better their claims to valor and courage rather than the rear-echelon position the GBMA planned for them. Although there are at least three atlases devoted exclusively to maps of the Gettysburg battlefield (by Bradley Gottfried, Philip Laino,
and Steven Stanley), none of the unit positions marked in these volumes can possibly hope to claim absolute accuracy, and so neither will I. My maps must serve as general guides to the reader, alongside the text, and not be viewed as testimony worth fighting over.

That uncertainty also reaches through to the sources I have used for this book. The literature on the Gettysburg battle is enormous—the 2004 edition of Richard Sauers’
The Gettysburg Campaign, June 3–August 1, 1863: A Comprehensive, Selectively Annotated Bibliography
lists 6,193 books, articles, chapters, and pamphlets on the battle; an entire biannual magazine,
The Gettysburg Magazine
, has been published since 1989 focusing in exacting detail on various facets of the battle, and ponderous volumes have appeared from distinguished university presses, dividing the story of the battle into single days, parts of days, and finally to quarter hours or so. I have spent most of my time in pursuit of the accounts written by the veterans of the battle themselves, in the form of autobiographies, lectures, pamphlets, dedicatory speeches, ill-tempered newspaper articles, self-aggrandizing memoirs, and that most peculiar of American literary genres, the regimental history. The further in time from the battle these recollections were written, the less reliability is sure to be attached to these reminiscences. But that is not a fixed rule. There are regimental histories published immediately after the war which show little sign that the authors saw or understood most of the battle they had fought through, whereas numerous writers, even long after the fact, came up with nuggets of reminiscence so vivid that time has clearly been no dimmer of them.

Nor is there any easy refuge from false lead to be found in self-limiting one’s curiosity to unpublished manuscripts. There is no authoritative census of Gettysburg-related manuscript sources, although Sauers includes a fifty-two-page listing, by unit, of letters, papers, and diaries. But even letters written from the field frequently betray little comprehension of what had been happening around the writers, and an old soldier can be as forgetful of detail after a day as after a decade. And, as Richard Holmes discovered as a correspondent during the Falklands War in 1982, it took no long time before veterans, hearing other veterans, incorporated a certain agreed-upon story line into their own accounts. Holmes was amazed to interview Falklands veterans, and discover how “a carapace of accepted fact hardened almost before my eyes.” The temptation would always be to make the experience of battle more reasoned, more synchronous with others’ experiences, than it had ever seemed at the moment. One of the greatest collections of manuscript materials on the battle is the vast heap of letters and accounts (mostly Union) solicited by John Badger Bachelder, the battle’s first great remembrancer, and
finally published in 1994–95 as
The Bachelder Papers
by David and Audrey Ladd in three volumes. But even within
The Bachelder Papers
, the old veterans advance conflicting accounts, rehearse old grievances, debate large-scale tactical pictures which they could never have known about at the time, and defend pet theories with only slightly less vehemence than that which they employed in the battle itself. The same is true of John Warwick Daniel, who essayed to be the Confederate Bachelder. In the end, the chronicler of Gettysburg has little to take for a final guide than the refined twitching of common sense, and a willingness to endure the arrows of outraged fortune hunters who have planned to make that fortune from this or that presumably pristine version of events. Again, the same question posed to me by timing has to be posed about sources, no matter how immediate:
Could this really have happened at that time?

Nor is there any way that these sources could finally settle the great controversies of the battle:

These are only the most prominent of the Gettysburg controversies, and I put forward the answers I do with the resigned confidence that neither reason nor reasonableness is guaranteed certainty of success over self-interest and braggadocio.

Occasionally, I have taken my own counsel as the only way to make sense of certain problems in the Gettysburg narrative. It puzzles me why the ridgeline which forms the western boundary of John Rose’s wheat field is routinely called “the Stony Hill,” when it is perfectly obvious to the naked eye that it is a ridge, like the other undulating waves of ridges running eastward from South Mountain, and so I have determined to call it “the stony ridge.” Likewise, it makes no sense to replicate the ethnic tone-deafness of nineteenth-century
Americans in spelling Alexander Schimmelpfennig’s name as
Schimmelfenning
or
Schimmelfennig
(or, as his grave monument indecorously renders it,
Schimmelfinnig
), and so Schimmelpfennig he stays.

Books about battles are not in high fashion, since they frequently engender suspicion in prominent places that an interest in war—even a war as distant as the American Civil War—panders to an unhappy streak of destructiveness in the American psyche, and by rights should be stuffed into some genie’s bottle lest it entice more of the naïve to serve it. By contrast, in the middle of the nineteenth century, war was considered (and not just by unbalanced psychotics) to be “the highest, most exalted art; the art of freedom and of right, of the blessed condition of Man and of humanity—the Principle of Peace.” A century and a half later, the lure of the Civil War remains strong, but dealing with its battles has acquired among my academic peers a reputation close to pornography. This, despite the nagging reality that aggression is an instinctive form of human self-preservation; despite the curiosity, for those of a Marxist bent, that no more efficient repudiation of liberal individualism (another ideology now on-the-town) exists than the collectivity of war and combat; and despite Susan Sontag’s ironic reminder that “war was and still is the most irresistible—and picturesque—news.” However, a generation of professional historians whose youth was dominated by the Vietnam War has not been eager to embrace
any
war after that experience, except perhaps for the purpose of demonstrating the atrocious malevolence with which American soldiers are habitually supposed to wage it or the pitiful pall of death which it spreads across the land.

This book will not offer much comfort to those persuasions, if only because we cannot talk about the American nineteenth century without talking about the Civil War, and we cannot talk about the Civil War without acknowledging, even grudgingly, that the Civil War era’s singular event was a
war
, and that all the other issues hung ineluctably on the results achieved by large numbers of organized citizens attempting to kill one another. But even more contrary to the grain, the American Civil War—and the battle of Gettysburg in particular—were conducted with an amateurism of spirit and an innocence of intent which would be touching if that same amateurism had not also contrived to make it so bloody. And it was remembered by its veterans as the occasion for a great ratification “of freedom and of right.” Although it has become commonplace to speak shudderingly of the Civil War as the “first modern war” or the “first total war,” there are few things more impressive than the sheer
lack
of totality in both the battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War as a whole, and few things more humiliating than the bewildered, small-town
incompetence with which American soldiers addressed themselves to the task of managing, directing, and commanding the mammoth citizen-armies they had called forth.

The best testimony to that lack of totality is the silent witness of places like Gettysburg, where almost all of the buildings that sat in the path of the battle are still here. The technology of nineteenth-century warfare, even as advanced as it was over that of the Napoleonic Wars, was simply too limited to knock them down. It is difficult to understand the “modernity” of a war fought with single-shot muzzle-loading weapons, under the direction of commanders whose chief credential was a diploma from a military engineering school, and on battlefields where it was still reasonably safe to stand up. The principal historical cognates of Gettysburg and the American Civil War are not the Western Front or My Lai, but the Crimean War, the North Italian War of 1859, the Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864, the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars, and the Taiping Rebellion—none of which are more modern than high-button shoes and pince-nez. The same is true of the concept of war which still prevailed among the Civil War armies, a concept which still accepted the “bracketing” of war from civil life as a sort of idealized joust between sovereigns who possessed a monopoly on state violence. Because the sovereigns in the Civil War were the peoples of the Union and the Confederacy, the Civil War holds the portents of mass, popular wars in which no result could be acceptable but the total defeat of an enemy. But these were still only portents, just as the popular resistance of the French people after the debacle at Sedan in 1870 made the Franco-Prussian War a similar portent of such conflicts.

A book on the battle of Gettysburg will also lose contact with fashion because Gettysburg does not touch on emancipation and has almost nothing to say on the subject of African-American agency. There were, to be sure, several thousand black people involved in the campaign, perhaps as many as thirty thousand. But they came as slaves, as the logistical underpinning of the rebel army, and left only the most passing traces. Nor is there much agency to be celebrated in slaves who were compelled to work for those who were defending slavery. There were no black troops at Gettysburg, and most of the free black inhabitants of the town of Gettysburg had fled to avoid capture and enslavement by the Confederate invaders. (If there was malevolence anywhere in this story, it was here—but it was the sort of malevolence which had been going on for 250 years, and not an expression of some newfound embrace of “total war.”) A few black Gettysburgians would end up serving in the Union armies—and I call the roll here of Andrew Meads, James Russell, and Stewart Woods, the latter serving in the 54th Massachusetts and miraculously surviving both the 54th’s decimation at Battery Wagner two weeks after Gettysburg
and the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville—but otherwise, Gettysburg was almost univocally a battle for the Union, and it was made all the more so by Lincoln’s famous address, which contains no allusion to slavery, and casts the battle entirely in the context of the preservation of liberal democracy.

Of course, for many of the Civil War’s cultured despisers, the Union is old hat and liberal democracy the listless desert of history’s last—and very dull—man. Emancipation makes a better story for our times. But emancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other). Lincoln insisted that the Civil War was being fought by the United States in order to restore the constitutionally mandated union of those states, and the Gettysburg Address was his most eloquent declaration that the ultimate purpose of the war was the test it afforded of the practical viability of democracy. This was not because race, slavery, and emancipation were unimportant to Lincoln, but because the Union (and the liberal democracy it represented) and emancipation were not, after all, mutually exclusive goals. Unless the Union was restored, there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln’s best antislavery intentions.

But by the same token, restoring the Union would be a hollow accomplishment unless the blot of race-based slavery was wiped from the Union’s escutcheon, and in that there was as much black agency at work at Gettysburg as on any other Civil War battlefield, because no democracy worth its name could continue to drag the burden of slavery around after it. “Under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?” asked a sarcastic Sydney Smith, from his English perch, a full forty years before the war,