Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values (review)

BOOK REVIEWS319 "shaping public opinion continued to be perhaps [Lincoln's] most vital duty" (222). This is almost certainly true, but one would like to hear much more of how he did it in a prebroadcasting age when he made scarcely any public speeches and never traveled more than one hundred miles outside Washington. This book is a major addition to the already crowded fields of Lincoln studies and Civil War historiography. Along with his earlier work, A People's Contest , it establishes Professor Paludan once and for all as an outstanding authority on the North in the Civil War. Any Lincoln or Civil War scholar worth his or her salt would have to confess to a measure of envy at the opportunity given to Professor Paludan to write the Lincoln volume in the admirable Kansas series on the American presidency. But in all honesty, he or she would also have to admit that few could have performed the task as well, and none better. Peter J. Parish Middlesex University and University of London Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values. By Kent Gramm. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Pp. 288. $24.95.) Gettysburg is made for metaphor as well as movies. Kent Gramm, a novelist turned political philosopher, knows metaphor, and he turns with a vengeance to all the possibilities posed by a meditation on the meaning of the Battle of Gettysburg . Like most of the musketry of the Civil War, his noise is more impressive than his accuracy, but his hits are deadly enough. One can value Gettysburg without agreeing that all his metaphors are fired at the right target. In rough structure Mr. Gramm provides an anecdotal account of the battle, writ large and small, with musings drawn from his own wanderings about the contemporary battlefield. I share his awe—which never wanes—at the stunning courage of the common soldiers and best commanders in both the Union and Confederate armies. Who can stand at the monument of the 20th Maine on Little Round Top and remain dry-eyed as we hear the words of Joshua Chamberlain on "Remembrance Day"? Gettysburg is holy ground for Americans, especially for those of us descended from the Anglo-Americans, German Americans, Celtic Americans , and African Americans who fought the war. Waterloo, Gallipoli, and Normandy evoke martial memories, but they are not the same as those brought by the ghosts ofGettysburg. Mr. Gramm's account of the battle is generally sound, and he has an eye for human tragedy that gives Gettysburg an emotional texture that sometimes evades more dispassionate authors. His chapter on life, love, and death of Maj. Gen. and Mrs. Dorsey Pender is Civil War writing at its very best. Mr. Gramm, who resides in Wisconsin, establishes his line of argument in Yankee terms, but he discards his honorary membership in the Iron Brigade early in the book and gives equal and evenhanded treatment to both armies. As commentary on the Civil War, some quite insightful, some equally banal, 320CIVIL WAR HISTORY Gettysburg is interesting and provocative reading, reminiscent of Evan Connell 's Son of the Morning Star, but a good deal more accurate. Mr. Gramm is quite successful in using Gettysburg as a metaphor for the entire war. He argues that the war cannot be understood except as an ideological struggle deeply rooted in the moral principles—however different—that drove the Union and Confederate armies into a lethal embrace that only exhaustion and many deaths could loosen. Without being too obvious, Mr. Gramm joins the ranks of those contemporary historians who have reasserted the fundamental clash of values that made the War of the Rebellion also the War Between the States. And Mr. Gramm admires the men who held convictions that impelled them to make one Pickett's Charge after another. As a social critic of late-twentieth-century America, Gramm is less successful in his role as a latter-day Thoreau. Gramm deplores the fact that the virtu that made the Civil War possible no longer animates a heterogeneous society thrown together in an urban stew in which the ethnic, race, class, religious, and educational ingredients do not blend. In his jeremiads against cupidity, commercialism...