Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory. By Carol Reardon. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

             No single moment from the Civil War is as indelibly etched on the American psyche as Pickett’s Charge, the ill-fated Confederate assault Robert E. Lee ordered James Longstreet to launch at the Union center on July 3, 1863, the final day of the battle of Gettysburg. However, simply to call this best-remembered episode of the Civil War “Pickett’s Charge” is a historical misnomer, considering the assault was composed of three divisions: George Pickett’s all-Virginia division and the divisions of James Pettigrew and Isaac Trimble which included North Carolinians, Mississippians, Tennesseans, Alabamians, and Virginians. As revealed by Carol Reardon, Penn State’s George Winfree Professor of American History, in Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory, much of what we think we know about the assault remembered as the Confederacy’s “High Water Mark” is actually the product of conflicting recollections and often acrimonious debates over how to assign credit and blame and how to interpret the fateful attack.

            Reardon explores historical memory in terms of both participants’ efforts to reconstruct details of historical events and the values, interpretations, and myths that are attached to the event in the popular mind. While we often assume soldiers vividly remember recall every moment of every battle, veterans’ attempts to reconstruct what happened on July 3, 1863, were in fact clouded by the fog of war, literally and metaphorically. While soldiers tend to vividly recall their first battle, Gettysburg veterans often recalled Pickett’s Charge by the most singular scenes or in comparison to previous battles. Furthermore, soldiers in combat experience a sharp degree of tunnel vision which limits how much one individual could take in from a clash involving tens of thousands of men. As a result, survivors of the action left us conflicting accounts, including at least five differing accounts of where the first shot from the Confederate artillery bombardment landed.  The aftermath of the charge saw fevered attempts to reconstruct it in officers’ reports and newspaper accounts, each of which were prone to exaggeration. Combatants had vested interests in burnishing their performances in battle, while newspapers North and South sensationalized the event and hopelessly butchered the facts by reprinting rumors that this general had been killed or that one captured. Some of the first battles over memory took place in these venues, particularly as survivors from Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s division fumed when the Richmond papers emphasized almost exclusively the role played by Virginians.

            Pickett’s Charge quickly moved from the realm of history, which we assume (rightly or wrongly) to have some objective value, to the subjective realm of memory, in which history takes on meaning. The July 3 attack soon took on two particularly interpretations. The first ensconced the Battle of Gettysburg as the putative turning point of the Civil War, making Pickett’s Charge the effective “climax of the climax,” according to one historian. The Confederate assault on the Union center ostensibly marked the high tide of the Southern war effort, the breakthrough at “Bloody Angle” the Confederate High Water Mark, and the subsequent defeat the beginning of the end for the Confederacy (a view not shared by those who fought the first and second days’ battles at Gettysburg or by veterans of the Western Theater, the “center ring” of the Civil War). This interpretation made the charge the crown jewel of the Lost Cause, the supreme and sublime moment of Confederate valor and defeat. Fundamentally linked to this memory was a second legacy, one which cast Pickett’s Virginians almost exclusively in the starring role. How to remember the Charge became a bitter bone of contention for ex-Confederates. Veterans produced detailed accounts and maps arguing which state’s troops advanced the furthest against the Union defenders. Famously, James Longstreet, who had protested Lee’s plan for the charge, earned the ire of Virginia partisans for daring to criticize the Confederacy’s top general. Notably, most of Pickett’s men, veterans of Longstreet’s First Corps, refused gainsay Longstreet (or Lee or Pickett). Many Southerners idealized George Pickett as the Confederacy’s beau ideal, most famously and inaccurately his widow Sallie, while a few spoke up to point out Pickett’s disastrous combat record. Pickett’s Charge also became a touchstone for reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans, symbolized at Gettysburg reunions at which former enemies shook hands across the stone wall.

            Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory must be considered one of the most sophisticated and best written books on Civil War memory and the subject of historical memory in general. Carol Reardon combines copious research with extensive knowledge of the Battle of Gettysburg (having conducted numerous staff rides and tours of the battlefield), military historiography, and memory studies. Rather than merely repeating what different individuals have written about the charge, Reardon provides in-depth analysis of how differing historical visions and agendas competed to shape our memory of Pickett’s Charge. Readers will not only gain a fresh understanding of the Civil War’s most famous event but also insight into how history and memory are fashioned.

Jonathan Steplyk                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Texas Christian University

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Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory.  By Carol Reardon.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.  285 pp.

            The Confederate assault on the Union center at Gettysburg on 3 July 1863, what Americans know as Pickett’s Charge, Carol Reardon notes “rests on a double foundation of both history and memory” (3).  With this work, then, she traces how memory had so distorted facts by the 1913 golden anniversary of the battle that Pickett’s Charge justified the Lost Cause for Virginians, despite protests from citizens both North and South.  Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory, utilizing recent scholarly methodologies in identity and memory construction, engagingly determines how an assault no soldiers comprehensively remembered nonetheless became the symbol of Confederate military climax.

            Except for a brief conclusion, Reardon confines her study to a fifty-year period, between 1863 and 1913, highlighting key turning points in the development of the Pickett’s Charge myth.  She argues that when Confederate and Union armies disengaged in central Pennsylvania on Independence Day 1863, soldiers viewed the battle through only “disconnected threads” (16) of the pre-assault cannonade, events idiosyncratic to their own experience, the bloody fighting at the Angle, and the numerous casualties.  Nonetheless, both sides left the field looking to justify their sacrifice.  Richmond journalists, specifically the Richmond Enquirer’s Jonathan Albertson, did so less than two weeks after the end of the battle by elevating the great sacrifice of Virginians, excluding men of other states, forming the foundation of the Pickett’s Charge myth.  After the war, through the 1870s, Virginians published memoirs that built on this myth of Virginia’s sacrifice.  After the 1870 death of General Robert E. Lee, Old Dominion Democrats began to criticize Gen. James Longstreet’s conduct in the battle, forcing George Pickett’s men to seek acceptance in the North through more published works.  Northerners believed the Virginian narrative so much that some invited Pickett’s men back to the battlefield in 1887, a gesture that assured the assault became “one of the most enduring symbols” (107) of the Confederacy.

            Even so, according to Reardon, after 1887 groups in the North and South questioned the Virginia appropriation of the assault; Virginians fought back and succeeded in establishing their vision as the dominant one.  In the South, opposition principally came from states whose men fought and died under Pickett on 3 July.  Likewise, Northern veterans disputed the prevailing narrative, citing their bravery in repulsing the attack, a fact the Virginia myth overlooks for obvious reasons.  Nonetheless, at the turn of the twentieth century, Virginians had significantly countered these visions through a number of tracts, some of which Pickett’s widow Sallie wrote.  Thus, by the time the government started interpreting the battlefield around 1910, “Pickett and his men decisively won” (198) the battle for American memory even if they failed militarily.  In a brief epilogue, the author remarks that subsequent media portrayals, most notably Ted Turner’s 1993 motion picture Gettysburg, keep “Virginia’s charge alive” (211).

            Thus, Reardon shows how an assault on the Union center became “Pickett’s Charge” by the time men wearing blue and men donning grey came together at the 1913 golden anniversary of the battle.  Her interpretation relies heavily on state pride and argues that the modern myth embraces a vision that acknowledges the participation of only Virginians, lauds the division’s commander, and extols it as the high tide of the Confederacy.  At the same time, this version fails to give agency to troops from outside Virginia, overestimates the limit of the advance, and overgeneralizes the significance of the attack.

            To get the most out of this work, the reader will have to excuse Reardon for blurring dates and periods.  Reardon researched this topic extensively, using published sources, soldiers’ diaries, and other unpublished archival materials, but very often the reader finds years blurred in the narrative.  While the reader can check the footnotes to find the publication dates of key tracts, rarely does he find specific dates in Reardon’s narrative.  Such an omission, resultant from the fluid periodization of intellectual history, obscures the chronological focus of the narrative.

            Still, Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory supplies an important and interesting discussion of one of America’s favorite historical moments.   Relying on recently scholarly conceptions of identity construction and memory, Reardon does show that events and recollection often diverge, a postmodern interpretation that questions, at its foundation, the existence of historical truth.  What Americans “know” about “Pickett’s Charge” should change after reading this book.

J. Knarr