150 Years Remembrance
From the acclaimed Civil War historian, a brilliant new
historyβthe most intimate and richly readable account we
have hadβof the climactic three-day battle of Gettysburg
(July 1β3, 1863), which draws the reader into the heat,
smoke, and grime of Gettysburg alongside the ordinary
soldier, and depicts the combination of personalities and
circumstances that produced the greatest battle of the Civil
War, and one of the greatest in human history.
Of
the half-dozen full-length histories of the battle of
Gettysburg written over the last century, none dives down so
closely to the experience of the individual soldier, or
looks so closely at the sway of politics over military
decisions, or places the battle so firmly in the context of
nineteenth-century military practice. Allen C. Guelzo shows
us the face, the sights, and the sounds of
nineteenth-century combat: the lay of the land, the fences
and the stone walls, the gunpowder clouds that hampered
movement and vision; the armies that caroused, foraged,
kidnapped, sang, and were so filthy they could be smelled
before they could be seen; the head-swimming difficulties of
marshaling massive numbers of poorly trained soldiers, plus
thousands of animals and wagons, with no better means of
communication than those of Caesar and Alexander.
What emerges is an untold story, from the trapped and
terrified civilians in Gettysburgβs cellars to the insolent
attitude of artillerymen, from the taste of gunpowder
cartridges torn with the teeth to the sounds of marching
columns, their tin cups clanking like an anvil chorus.
Guelzo depicts the battle with unprecedented clarity,
evoking a world where disoriented soldiers and officers
wheel nearly blindly through woods and fields toward their
clash, even as poetry and hymns spring to their minds with
ease in the midst of carnage. Rebel soldiers look to march
on Philadelphia and even New York, while the Union struggles
to repel what will be the final invasion of the North. One
hundred and fifty years later, the cornerstone battle of the
Civil War comes vividly to life as a national epic,
inspiring both horror and admiration.
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