The Third Day at Gettysburg & Beyond (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The ThirdDay at Gettysburg & Beyond. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. x, 217. $24.95.) The third volume in Gary Gallagher's edited collection of essays on Gettysburg 's three days inaugurates the University ofNorth Carolina's series "Military Campaigns of the Civil War." The six contributors to this volume are among the leaders in the "New Military History." Their revisionist approach will, according to Gallagher, "illuminate some of the ways in which campaigns influenced the civiUan sphere and how expectations from home in turn affected men in the armies" (vii). As in his previous volumes, Gallagher also focused on the controversies of battlefield leadership. Carol Reardon's essay showed how selective memory, state rivalries, and myth making altered the story of the greatest massed infantry attack in American history. In the aftermath of Pickett's Charge, second guessers and blame throwers criticized Pickett for his failure. Then in a counterattack, the hero makers and justifiers in Virginia Uterary circles pushed a story of Pickett's Virginians left unsupported by a bewildered Georgian named Longstreet and by Pettigrew's North Carolinians. The Virginia story came to be the accepted historical version. Reardon concludes that Pettigrew and Longstreet did their duty and she agrees with Pickett's explanation of his failure that "the Union Army had something to do with it" (84). Among the participants in Pickett's Charge, Generals Lewis Armistead and Richard Gamett died within a hundred yards of each other. Armistead is famous for putting his black hat on the tip ofhis sword as he penetrated the Union line. Gamett, too injured to walk, refused to miss the fight and rode his horse into the massed fire at the stone wall. Robert Krick's essay reveals the similarity in the Civil War background of each general which brought them to a parallel destiny at Gettysburg. Born in 18 17, both men graduated from West Point, served in the 6th U.S. Cavalry, supported the wars of manifest destiny against Indians and Mexicans, commanded at either Fort Riley or Fort Laramie, and resigned in 1 86 1 to accept commissions in the Confederate army. Krick's essay provides valuable insights into military Ufe on the frontier as well as into the lives of two of the South's most visible martyrs. 330CIVIL WAR HISTORY Union sergeant Ben Hirst of the 14th Connecticut Infantry did not die at Gettysburg and was hardly a leader. He did write a letter to his wife, Sarah, in the immediate aftermath of the fight and another one three months afterward. Robert Bee analyzed the letters and found that Hirst's missives differed over time and that his latter account reflected the values of the Connecticut community the sergeant grew up in. His first letter revealed his fear and indicated a questionable behavior under fire. But in the revised account, Hirst portrayed himself in courageous, respectable, manly terms that reflected community values. Bee's study affirms historian Reid Mitchell's conclusions that soldiers worried qreatly over their reputations and tried to behave in ways that would satisfy the home folk. Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and George Gordon Meade also had reputations to uphold. William Garrett Piston explores Longstreet's culpability in the defeat and concluded that Lee's loose command style caused many lost opportunities. Piston warns that "one must avoid the double standard implicit in criticizing Ewell for his failure to take initiative and responsibility on the afternoon of July 1 while faulting Longstreet for showing initiative during the night of July 2 and morning of July 3" (45). Still, Piston faults Longstreet for not having Pickett's men in position on time. Gallagher shows that Lee, his soldiers, and civilians did not view the battle as a defeat. Some writers criticizes a lost opportunity, but few Americans had any sense that the battle marked the turning point or the "High Tide" of the war. That analysis would come from the pens of Lost Cause writers and later historians. Lee's contemporaries saw it as a "temporary setback" ( 1 ) unlike the disaster at Vicksburg. Lee believed the campaign successful in its original objectives...