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  • Twilight at Little Round Top: July 2, 1863—The Tide Turns at Gettysburg
  • Bart Talbert
Twilight at Little Round Top: July 2, 1863—The Tide Turns at Gettysburg. By Glenn W. LaFantasie. New York: Wiley, 2005. ISBN 0-471-46231-4. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 315. $27.95.

Glenn LaFantasie's Twilight at Little Round Top is part military history, part sociological study of the horrors of war and part insistence that slavery was the main question in America's Civil War. When focusing on the military question, LaFantasie, former deputy historian of the U.S. Department of State, maintains that the Union defense of Little Round Top was the decisive action at Gettysburg because it forced Lee to launch Pickett's fateful charge, and that the battle's result did not decide the war. He also attempts to show that Joshua Chamberlain, who comes off as a vain egotist and prevaricator, has received too much praise for the Union defense on Meade's left and that it is the soldiers, not the commanders, who deserve praise for the deeds of both sides.

In addition to the usual sources on Gettysburg, LaFantasie makes first use of a number of primary documents, chiefly those contained in the Oates Family Papers. The author seeks to describe in detail what it was like fighting on those rocky slopes; and, with the aid of excellent maps by George Skoch, does a credible job. But the lines dealing with military matters only constitute a relatively small percentage given the title. The rest of the work is dominated by LaFantasie's opinions concerning the slavery question and the horrors of war. Page after page of melodramatic prose that repeatedly employs the words death, blood, bloodletting, nightmare, horror, carnage, slaughter, burial, etc., give the work a soap-opera feel—much of what is here is not really military history—it is sociology and contradictory.

When dwelling on the slavery issue for instance, LaFantasie sees Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as "like a divine decree" that changed a war fought to save the Union into "something higher in purpose and significance" (p. 9) but then admits it was a political-military ploy that did not free one slave and protected the institution in Union-controlled areas. He also concedes that the Proclamation did little to improve the "negative opinions of African Americans" held by "many men serving in the Army of the Potomac" and that "a good number" of its soldiers found it to be "a scurrilous document" (p. 33). He then, however, devotes three pages to the life of a proabolitionist member of the 140th New York Infantry who happened to be a nephew of a close associate of Frederick Douglass.

When attempting to prove that Southerners were, first and foremost, fighting the war to protect slavery, LaFantasie quotes a scant few of that opinion, including one only described as "a North Carolinian," and praises them for their "commendable honesty" (p. 71). The multitude of others who, before [End Page 531] and after the war, stated they were fighting for the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers are ridiculed here; their statements are referred to as "high-flying words, the kind of words behind which Civil War soldiers hid their true feelings, their deepest emotion" (p. 210). The words of Northern soldiers that do not fit the argument are excused. LaFantasie holds that Union soldiers fought hard for an ideology that bundled together "godly values and Christian morality" and the Republican party's ideals of "free labor, free soil, and free men" (p. 136)—it is well known, however, that the North enjoyed no monopoly on God and that the slogan concerning free labor, soil and men was part of the party's prewar platform that sought to prohibit blacks, free and slave, from entering the western territories. Recent scholarship points to the fact that the vast majority of soldiers in both armies were fighting for their comrades.

A better title for this work would be Little Round Top, Etc. & The War Was About Slavery. The author's argument would benefit from recent work concerning the war's root causes found in When...

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