Gettysburg vs. The Rest of the Civil War

I think maybe it’s time to see a shrink about this phobia…. You seem to keep revisiting Gettysburg with these love hate maunderings. Is there some angst that just maybe you’re wrong and your gonna go to hell ’cause you don’t believe in Gettysburg? Have you no shame that you don’t realize that six Civil War pixies drop stone cold dead every time you sanctimoniously proclaim you don’t believe in Gettysburg?? Don’t you realize that the Civil War fairie is gonna stop putting Mort Kunstler prints under the pillows of good little boys and girls because Eric Wittenberg can’t find it in his heart of hearts to come to Gee Whiz and embrace the true religion of Gettysburg??? (pant, pant, pant. ) 😉

Petersburg IS extremely interesting (I live here: err, it’s not interesting because I live here. I decided to live here because of the campaign). Unfortunately its a long campaign, and hard to embrace in detail. And you can’t come down here and see much. (Fort Sedgwick – Fort Hell – is under the parking lot of a long defunct KMart. Folks get real impressed when you point that out to them.) There are opportunities for some dramatic writing in this campaign. It usually doesn’t have ‘southern” appeal because it is palsied with eventual defeat. But Petersburg is where AP Hill and the third Corps came of age and did their best service. There is a remarkable tension to the Campaign. The illusion of Federal overwhelming superiority persists in the minds of observers. In fact, the military forces of both combatants were attenuated and each move and counter was done fretfully, fearing a counterstroke that could unravel the whole situation.

As you have previously noted, sometimes with surprise, good books sell. Can’t help ya with the fatal attraction to Disneyburg. It’s locked in concrete, and even the most ardent historical advocate for a larger view of the war is tempted to suck at the cash tit. (Consider Stephen Sears book).

(And I still need to get to Disneyburg and spend some time admiring the tree chopping. Some of the wild eyed evangelicals tell me we’re gonna have to rewrite all the histories now ’cause the Virgin can be seen in the open spaces – hallelujah.)

Well I am biased, but I agree 100% about Chickamauga. I think the larger problem is that it is considered by many to be so confusing, so many events going on at the same time, not like most battles where you have an even flow to them.

Eric,
To your comments about Petersburg, I say Hallelujah. I find it the war’s most interesting campaign for its strategic significance, personalities, political-military interplay, diversity (joint ops, siegecraft, battles of maneuver, cavalry, logistics), and fertile ground for memory studies. I am aware of an ongoing project to document memories of the Battle of the Crater, and I think A. Wilson Greene (historian at Pamplin) is working on a multi-volume history of the campaign. I can’t think of a better person to do that. A monograph on City Point and the Union logistics machine would be excellent as well.

I’m a native of New Kent County, very close by to Petersburg, so I may be biased, but for my money Petersburg has the most potential for future scholarship of any major Civil War campaign. Maybe the fact of its occurring at the end of the war, and the resulting feeling of inevitability that surrounds it (justified or not!), have also prevented more work on it.
Charles

Haven’t picked up Somers since reading it when published. It would mean more now than it did then as I’ve become more familiar with the campaign. It’s very dry, but detailed.

Cozzens is excellent, though his chapter compartmentalizations get a little flighty at times. Need an atlas handy with larger operational maps to keep track of where you’re going.

The Virginia CW Battles and Leaders series has several good Petersburg Books. TJ Howe’s wasted Valor – June 15-18 is one o fthe full analyses of the first federal push on the city.

Forgotten Valor, the rediscovered memoirs of Orlando Wilcox is a gem. His commentary and papers on Fort Stedman are a revelation. Bursts the Hartranft Myth.

Eric,

Hello, I thought I would wander over and post on your site for the first time – and you provided the ideal seque, by bringing up Chickamauga.

First, I drifted away from Gettysburg some years ago because I found most of the discussion about the battle had become redundant. I still read some of the better books that come out on the battle, but I do not study it in quite the same detail that I once did.

But familairity breeds that detail. To a certain extent, publishers have to train their audiences. I don’t expect other battles to ever develop the following the Gettysburg holds, and the bookshelves will never groan under a similar weight, say, about Chickamauga, but there is still room for development.

However, Chickamauga, in particular, is a very hard battle to get right. Cozzens book is a fine study, with lots of detail, but it is also somewhat confusing and there plenty of things about the battle not included. I know another author who was attempting a study of it, but gave up because of lack of time, the confusing nature of the fighting precluded easy description, etc. The more detail you go into at Chickamauga, the more confusing the battle becomes.

I have a huge source collection on Chickamauga – possibly the largest concentration of published and unpublished sources describing the battle in one place – and my original intention was to tell the battle via an atlas of about 80 maps and supporting text. I still intend to do that, but the time it has taken to get the first day of the battle down has been far more than I expected when I started.

So Bragg, Rosey, etc, all have limitations as draws for the reading audience, but the battle itself, IMO, is part of the problem.

The good news is, if publishers and authors do build that audience, there is enough detail in Chickamauga to rival even the most hardcore Gettysburg minutia junkie’s addiction.:)

When I was involved with a partner publishing wargames, we recognized that 2-3 topics dominated wargaming interest – Gettysburg was one of those. However, we viewed publishing games on those subjects as helping to subsidize some of the more obscure things we also wanted to publish. I suspect that book publishing shares many of the same problems – limited markets, small print runs and narrow margins. I think any good publisher needs a longer term strategy to survive, and that almost certainly, in the ACW world, means going to the Gettysburg well now and again – if only to draw enough water to help other topics grow:)

Dave Powell

Eric,

You said:

“This means that there are only a relatively small percentage of books devoted to the other 10,000 or so battles and skirmishes that took place during the Civil War. This means that there are still plenty of fascinating actions that deserve a detailed treatment but have been completely overlooked by history for whatever reasons.”

This is true…and I do find it a little odd (especially as an outsider) that so many ACW books are about Gettysburg, in much the same way that I find it odd that so many books on the Second World War are about the Normandy campaign.

On the flip side, I would ask you to stop and pause a moment and appreciate the COLOSSAL amount of work that has been done on the Civil War, work that for me as a relative latecomer to the field is utterly intoxicating in its breadth, quantity and sheer quality of scholarship.

I have a broad range of interests in military history, including the Eastern Front during the last war, Britain’s smaller colonial campaigns, the wars of French Indochina, the Falklands campaign, the Crimean war and the Risorgimento amongst others.

I’m used to having a maybe a dozen books of real quality to choose from and often less, discovering the American Civil War scholarship was like having my mouth stuffed with sweets. It was almost too much.

I have never come across a conflict for comprehensively researched, pored over and written about, including the last war.

Not that you’re not right vis a vis the Gettysburg obsession, but be thankful for the smashing stuff that’s produced.

Glenn Robertson has been working on a study of Chickamauga for decades. In addition to leading staff rides of the campaign and battle every year for the Command and General Staff College, he has accumulated about 27,000 note cards worth of material on the battle. He also informs me that Larry Daniel is working on a study of Chickamauga. Will Greene’s contracted with UNC to do a two-volume study of Petersburg (to which I say good luck in getting it all in two volumes!)

It is it a product of irrational obsession to say that Gettysburg is a cool and interesting (not to mention important) campaign to study, whether on the field or in an armchair? That’s why so much is published on the campaign and so many people visit the field–although the battlefield’s proximity to major population centers certainly helps. While I agree the battle receives disproportiate attention in Civil War literature, am I the only one who detects a whiff of snobbery in the complaints of the Gettysburg and Eastern Theater bashers? Yes, yes, we “know” the war was won in the West–as long as we ignore the fact that the killing of diehard Confederates that was a necessary precondition for Union victory occurred on a greater scale in the East and particularly at Gettysburg than anywhere else.

“While I agree the battle receives disproportiate attention in Civil War literature, am I the only one who detects a whiff of snobbery in the complaints of the Gettysburg and Eastern Theater bashers?”

Gosh, I thought that was the complaint of the “western campaign” folks?

Of course, holistically, the Virginia meat grinder, and the breakthroughs in other departments were interdependent. Didn’t somebody complain that Gettysburg’s mythos was too “southern” dependent? The Lost Cause maunder that Gettysburg was supposed to be the place where we won the war; but “someone” was a traitor…

It’s taken some time for us commoners to remove the blinders and understand that Vicksburg tipped the scales by freeing up the Army of the Tennessee to run amuck and throw its weight into the balance in central TN and on to Atlanta and the Carolinas. Maybe YOU know that the war was won in the west, maybe Steve Woodworth knows it; but I’m old enough to recall suggesting it 20 years ago and getting slapped around for it ;).

(Hey, I moved back to Virginnie, just so I could drive to all them thar useless eastern battlefields….)

Eric, thank you for all your efforts here. I’m a newbie. (That’s fun to say at 51.) GB was my entry to the ACW. I still have the souvenirs from my first visit at age 10 in 1964, but I let professional studies and their reading requirements keep me from reading history.

A weekend trip to GB last Sept. led me to dig out the Shelby Foote series my wife bought years ago. Most of the volumes were still in cellophane. My only other reading was Killer Angels.

I am hooked. I need a hobby that requires reading and study like I need a Minie ball to the occiput, like my fellow Lancastrian. For the newbie, GB is fascinating and for me, accessible. There is so much to digest for the beginner. It’s led me to begin Lincoln and the prelude. I’ve gone back to the founding and the debate on Federalism. My bookshelves are groaning.

In my mind, EW’s lament is akin to the singer with new material being tired of requests for their first “hit”. For better or worse, those folks are the market, too. To mangle some more metaphor, it’s like throwing away your seed corn. GB is a great way for people to enter the community.

The scholar must lead, and I imagine it can be frustrating, especially given the economics of publishing. I’m reading as fast as I can 🙂

Thanks again,
Don

Eric,

I agree that the Petersburg Campaign (and it was a campaign, not a “siege”) has not been covered adequately. Andy Trudeau’s book was a start, and there are a couple of good books on individuals battles during the campaign (Sommers’ being the best). The “definitive” history has yet to be written. Will Greene has finished a book on the town during the war, but I doubt that he will venture into a full campaign study. Tackling such a huge project probably scares off most historians.

Your point about other battles and campaigns needing better coverage is also correct. Maybe we don’t need 50 books on Palmetto Ranch, but we need a new study of the Red River Campaign.

Art