Sunday, July 6, 2008 4:05 PM CDT
COLUMN: Battle that turned tide of Civil War is closer to heart of July 4th
By HARRY REYNOLDS, Editorial Page Editor
hreynolds@jg-tc.com
Editor’s note: The following column by Harry Reynolds was first published on Saturday, July 3, 1993 (“Bloody Gettysburg closer to heart of July 4th”)
This holiday weekend, Gettysburg marks the 130th year of the battle that turned the tide of the Civil War.
It marked the last offensive into the North by Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army.
It was both the high water mark and ebb of the Confederacy.....and slavery.
When “Pickett’s Charge” dissolved in the face of bullets, bayonets and cannon — and thousands of men lay dead or dying on the gentle slopes of that Pennsylvania field — the America of dreams was reaffirmed.
The war that took the heaviest toll of American lives was fought by Americans, on American soil, pitting Americans against Americans.
It was a civil war inevitable, born of incongruity: that slavery could long endure in a land whose bedrock was freedom.
Lee’s army stumbled south, through rain, slowed by mud and the wounded — escaping pursuit because that excellent and intelligent leader of the Army of the Potomac, Gen. George Gordon Meade, was satisfied with fighting a defensive battle.
His army was tired and battered, but victorious. If Meade had pursued the Army of North Virginia, he might well have destroyed it.
Meade’s failure to pursue Lee angered President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was weary of generals who were unwilling — for one reason or another — to go after Lee’s army.
Meade had been given command of the Army of the Potomac not long before Gettysburg. The command had been offered to Gen. John Reynolds, an aggressive and capable officer, who declined to take it if he was not permitted to use it as he saw fit.
Reynolds was killed at Gettysburg.
I visited Gettysburg last year. The legions of marble monuments and still cannon, the thousands of graves, the museums and historic buildings tell where the armies were, but not what they were.
These armies were men, ordinary men, men who had homes and loved ones — places to go, things to do, lives to play out before the quiet of the grave.
They did extraordinary things at Gettysburg — both blue and gray. It is difficult to imagine the courage of those men in gray marching to certain death under the command of Gen. George Edward Pickett.
They were mowed like hay, but kept coming, compact, determined, a seemingly unstoppable force of nature.
But, they were stopped, torn apart and driven back. And that was the end of the Battle of Gettysburg.
The battle is being re-enacted at Gettysburg this weekend. The place will be swamped by tourists, Civil War buffs and thousands of men in blue and gray fighting the battle in a bloodless way.
If the North had lost at Gettysburg, the war might well have ended on southern terms. What the future of slavery might have been is difficult to say.
I have no doubt slavery was doomed. It was an immoral, arrogant and presumptuous institution violating every principle of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.
When we celebrate the Fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence Gettysburg Address and George Washington come to mind.
In a sense, Gettysburg may be closer to the heart of what the Fourth of July stands for. On those bloody days and painful nights, two roads were before us.
One would perpetuate and legitimize a system of slavery draining the nation of moral spirit.
The second led to Appomattox Courthouse, where slavery died.
We established a republic, skirting the issue of slavery in the interest of ratification of the Constitution.
And in the end, we paid a heavy price in blood for our failure to eradicate an institution designed to make life easier for white people by inflicting slavery on black people.
Gettysburg.
The beginning of the end of the Confederacy and slavery....
on a field of blood.
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Locke wrote on Jul 7, 2008 12:11 AM:
Steven W. Sears, Gettysburg (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, Pp. xiv, 623.)
Michael B. Ballard, Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, Pp. xv, 490.)
Historians, both academic and non-traditional, have sought out turning points in military conflicts. A turning point represented a threshold, which after crossed, ensured the eventual outcome of the war. Many historians have, since the conclusion of the American Civil War, considered Gettysburg the turning point of the conflict. Certainly it has contention for being the turning point in the Eastern Theatre. Others historians have suggested the Vicksburg campaign, in terms of its overall importance to the Union strategy, was the real turning point of the war. In doing so, historians have proven conventional wisdom wrong by examining the events in detail.
Because the majority of the battles, along with the major political and urban centers, were in the east, there has been a greater focus on that theatre. Here, there has been no greater focus on any single event than Gettysburg. Largely unaware of one another, the Union and Confederate armies collided and fought over a period of three days. The result was a decisive Union victory that signaled the last major Confederate advance into Northern territory. For this it has been considered the turning point in the Eastern Theatre. Early historians, however, failed analyzed the battle correctly because of long-standing misconceptions about the war. First, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had gained a mythical status subsequent to the war. He had become the embodiment of the Lost Cause. In hand with this status, he had also garnered the reputation of being the foremost general, Union or Confederate, of the war. Another assumption was the assumption the Army of the Potomac was incapable of beating the Army of Northern Virginia. Again, this fit conveniently within Lost Cause ideology because the Confederate soldier was superior and only lost the war due to attrition. Thus, because the defeat at Gettysburg could neither be Lees shortcomings as a commander nor the Yankee fighting spirit, other explanations were sought and accepted by the public. Confederate General James Longstreet, loathed for his post-war collaboration with the government during the Grant administration, was frequently blamed for the defeat at Gettysburg. After all, it was Longstreet who presided over Picketts ill-fated assault on Cemetery Ridge the morning of July 3, 1863. It is with challenging these long-standing postulations that Stephen W. Sears has presented his analysis of Gettysburg.
Gettysburg covered the entire span of the six-week campaign, but gave particular inspection to the three days of actual fighting. Repeatedly, alternative suggestions were given to explain the Union victory, or rather, the Confederate defeat. To start, the Army of the Potomac was presented as a competent military force with able leadership at the corps level. Moving up the chain of command, the General George G. Meade also proved to be a skilled leader. When comparing their artillery capacity, the North clearly had the advantage, especially in terms of placement, fire direction, and ammunition reserves. Additionally, several condemnations were laid upon the Confederate Generals. Jeb Stuarts cavalry, for example, circled to the east of the Union army on an unproductive foray that deprived Lee of reliable intelligence that was needed early in the battle. When Stuart returned, he arrived too late to provide any battlefield advantage aside from rear guard actions. Richard Ewell, depicted as excessively timid, insisted to Lee that his Second Corps remain inside the town. A. P. Hill, suffering from a chronic illness, was absent from the battlefield even while the majority of the divisions charging toward Cemetery Ridge, while commanded by Longstreet, were part of the unwell A. P. Hills Third Corps. Even the champion of the Lost Cause was challenged. Lee was despondent, and at times argumentative, with his subordinates. Because of these many reasons, Sears has challenged the widely held, but largely inaccurate, assumptions about Gettysburg.
Sears wrote Gettysburg not for academia, but for the general public. Unlike any other period of American history, the Civil War has captured the interest of many non-traditional historians. His writing reflected this wider audience. As such, he has taken some license with dialogue, especially between Lee and Longstreet, to advance his narrative. As might be expected, it lacked distracting footnotes, but contained a satisfactory section of endnotes. He cited a number of primary documents and also referenced a volume of secondary works, accessing both modern and dated sources. In this respect he has poured a well-constructed foundation for his arguments to rest upon. To assist the reader, a helpful catalog listing the command structures of both armies was included for easy reference. Thus, Sears has made the historiographical discourse accessible to the audience most likely to hold earlier, inaccurate assumptions about Gettysburg. For this, his endeavor deserves extra acclaim.
On July 4, 1863, the day after Longstreet supervised Picketts Charge, Vicksburg fell to the Union Army of the Tennessee. Traditionally, the Western Theatre of the war has been overlooked in favor of the eastern campaigns. Although overshadowed, the Vicksburg campaign has a strong claim to being the real turning point of the war. When the city finally surrendered, the Confederacy endured a severe blow from which it was never able to recover. It had lost an entire army, was geographically sliced in half, suffered a major logistical disruption, and was left demoralized. Conversely for the Union, victory gave them a general who could win while going on the attack. Yet for all this, Vicksburg has continued to languish in the shadow of the Eastern Theatre in general and of Gettysburg in particular. Michael B. Ballard has presented this campaign, with all its complexities, setbacks, and failures, to underscore it was essential to the Union victory in 1865.
Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi covered a much broader range of events than Gettysburg, because as its subtitle suggested, Vicksburg needs to be understood in the context of a campaign rather than a battle. It was more complex than a six-week foray into enemy territory, culminating in three days of bitter fighting. After hostilities broke out in 1861, the Mississippi River became an integral part of Union General Winfield Scotts Anaconda Plan. Vicksburg, positioned atop the bluffs overlooking the river, was a daunting objective that was required to secure the Mississippi and split the Confederacy. The summer of 1862 saw considerable action on the river, but Vicksburg remained a Secessionist stronghold that eluded the Union. Meanwhile, internal bickering between Union commanders prevented any substantial move against Vicksburg as Generals John McClernand and Ulysses S. Grant contended for President Lincolns support as they raced towards Vicksburg. Union troops, under the immediate command of Grants subordinate, William T. Sherman, attacked Vicksburg from the north in December where they were humiliated at Chickasaw Bayou. However, the tide turned in favor of the Union in April 1863 as a joint land-naval operation ferried troops downriver, past the batteries of Vicksburg, where the troops disembarked and headed westward and flank the defenders. Now poised to attack, Grants army assaulted the city twice in May, sustaining heavy causalities without yielding results. Afterwards the city was besieged and Confederate General John C. Pemberton surrendered the city on July 4, 1863. Thus, Vicksburg was a long, untidy affair. It encompassed a river campaign of dueling gunboats, smaller skirmishes that were tactical setbacks, and failed frontal assaults. Because of this and in addition to a long-standing bias toward the Eastern Theatre, Vicksburg has been the forgotten turning point in the war.
Ballard also wrote Vicksburg for a wider audience. To this end it has mixed appeal. Rather than attempting to disprove widely held myths about the event, Ballard has laid out the full campaign in chronological order. Similar to Gettysburg, endnotes replaced footnotes. He made stronger use of primary sources, citing more newspapers, official records, and other documents to provide a fact-based overview of the campaign. However, this approach created an amount of dryness that could disinterest the intended audience. Additionally, the narrative could be strengthened with more maps depicting the various small engagements. Combined with an existing preoccupation of the Eastern Theatre, non-traditional historians might never find Vicksburg. But for a monograph covering the entire Vicksburg campaign that can be accessed by non-traditional historians, Ballard deserves commend.
The Civil War has attracted a great deal of interest from average people something about the conflict stirs within them. In response to this increased interest, historians like Sears and Ballard have reached out to accommodate a wider audience of readers. Yet their audience has remained, much more so than academia, attached to long-held fallacies regarding the conflict. Sears attempted to rectify numerous misconceptions about Gettysburg, Lee, and the Army of the Potomac. Meanwhile, Ballard challenged the most common misunderstanding of all; Vicksburg, not Gettysburg, was the turning point of the war. Both Sears and Ballard have taken the serious academic discussion of Civil War and made it accessible to non-traditional historians. Well done. "