Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. By Allen C. Guelzo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Pp. xii, 632 ISBN 978-0-307-59408-2
One historian of the American Civil War recently asked, however appropriately, “is there anything new to say about the American Civil War?” One might easily transpose David Goldfield’s question to the realm of campaign and battle studies and marvel that there now exists yet another history of the Battle of Gettysburg—The Last Invasion—amidst a voluminous literature. Gettysburg enjoys its disputed position in Civil War memory as the most significant of all battles, the high water mark of the Confederacy, the battle that stymied Lee’s advance to Philadelphia and, accordingly, turned the tide of war in favor of the Union cause. As a professor of history at Gettysburg College, Guelzo is better positioned than most to write so authoritatively on the subject, and his history will likely endure as the authoritative, scholarly account of the battle.
Guelzo dictates the tone and tenor of his work in the opening pages. “This is a book,” he writes, “about a nineteenth-century battle” (xii). While it seems inconceivable that one could author a history of a military campaign in terms or methods foreign to the discipline of military history, Guelzo nonetheless begins his monograph with an apology for military history that is at once justifiable though perhaps overstated. With eloquence typical of his dramatic, theatrical, and romantic style, Guelzo defines Gettysburg as the place where a Union the founders envisaged as predicated upon total equality received its most rigorous test. The question of freedom in Abraham Lincoln’s “Apple of Gold” thesis (and, by ideological extension, Allen Guelzo’s own mind)—rooted in the Declaration of Independence—and put to the test by Constitutionally sanctioned slavery, “chilled the blood of every American who was not actually a slaveowner, and more than a few who were” (xviii). Only a Union in which slavery enjoyed no place, Guelzo claims, merited preservation. Thus, this seemingly straightforward history of a great nineteenth-century battle is imbued from the beginning with deeper ideological and historiographical assertions, namely: that the American Civil War, from its earliest stages, sought as its end the inevitable promise of emancipation; and, secondly, that Gettysburg (and the Eastern theatre of battle) does stand as the place where the Union achieved its greatest military victory, even if that victory failed to deliver a knock-out punch to the South.
It also comes as no surprise that Guelzo makes rather controversial claims in the book concerning the nature of the totality and brutality of Civil War combat. Guelzo envisions a war in which technology somehow accounted for the bloodiest war in the Americas and in the western hemisphere theretofore known to man, and, yet, somehow this war also lacked the power to “knock down” the buildings at Gettysburg. “The best testimony to that lack of totality,” Guelzo writes, “is the silent witness of places like Gettysburg, where almost all the buildings that sat in the path of the battle are still there” (xvii). This is a silly claim consistent with Guelzo’s nineteenth-century style that runs contrary to the grain of much respected scholarship in Civil War historiography. Civil War dead—some 750,000—speak to the totality of a war wrought by the deadliest technology available to that age, regardless of whether or not that technology seems, now in retrospect, “modern.”
Guelzo relies heavily on battle reminiscences and regimental combat reports to offer detailed descriptions of battle. The battle itself features into parts two, three, and four (the first, second, and third days, respectively), but a great strength of the book lies in how Guelzo prepares the battlefield. The reader encounters two armies divided by internal politics and feuds. The Army of Northern Virginia, contrary to Michael Shaara’s mythical claim, hardly represented the most unified army fighting for disunion ever to march. Virginians harbored deeply-seated distrust of North Carolinians and Georgians, whose secessionist fervor burned, in the eyes of those native to the Old Dominion, less bright. Lee demonstrated remarkable political savvy in refusing Jefferson Davis’ request to despatch Longstreet’s corps to the West in the spring of 1863. Guelzo seems to imply that the Union’s most capable field commanders, Hancock and Reynolds (both committed Democrats), refused command of the Army of the Potomac for political reasons and out of skepticism towards Lincoln’s Republican administration. McClellan sympathy held sway in the rank and file of the army.
In questions pertinent to perceptions of Gettysburg and its outcome Guelzo expectedly offers his own interpretation. Lee lost a battle he might otherwise have won, had his commanders acted in unison and under better coordination. As a result, “the battle put an end” to the aura of Lee the wise, Lee the invincible (464). As for J.E.B. Stuart’s supposed “dereliction of duty” so portrayed in Gettysburg lore, Guelzo maintains that no evidence exists to suggest Lee ever confronted Stuart personally, or so appraised Stuart’s invaluable quality, in a climactic meeting reminiscent of the Father and his Prodigal Son (362). Guelzo seems to downplay the significance of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Regiment to the support of the Union left on the second day. In all, Guelzo’s Gettysburg constitutes nothing less than a remarkable achievement. The book’s graphic combat descriptions—and descriptions of scenes after the fighting—help the reader to feel, perhaps more than Stephen Crane’s literary classic, as though he were at the field of battle. Meticulously researched and eloquently presented, it seems sure to endure as the authoritative history of the battle.
MITCHELL G. KLINGENBERG
Texas Christian University