Gettysburg – Stephen W. Sears, 2003 ★★★★½

Teaching Lee Humility

It began a brazen demonstration of contempt and wound up a history-altering mistake. In between, over three days, came intense carnage. Still, who won Gettysburg was not decided immediately; much of the how and why parts of the battle are still being debated.

Today we see Gettysburg as the turning point in the bloodiest of American wars. Back then, concrete conclusions were harder to reach. Stephen W. Sears offers readers something the people who fought at Gettysburg didn’t have: clarity.

For the Confederates, what was at stake was clear enough. They needed to stay on the attack and put the fight to the North. The commander of their Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, put it so: “There is always hazard in military movements, but we must decide between the positive loss of inactivity and the risk of action.”

The risk of action was real, though. The Confederates won more battles than they lost in the East those first two years, but winning came with a price. At the last major eastern battle, Chancellorsville, the South swiftly drove Gen. Joseph Hooker from the field (and eventually from active service) yet lost a higher percentage of troops than their foe, including their best ground commander, Stonewall Jackson.

Sears quotes a New York lieutenant: “I think such getting whipped, on our part, will soon use up the Confederacy.”

Lee gambled on an offensive to expose Northern civilians to the privations of war, force bloody counterattacks and sap Union morale in time for the 1864 elections. It was also prompted by a need to overshadow the war out west, where the South was about to lose Vicksburg. Yet this was no desperation play; Lee expected to win.

Robert E. Lee led his troops to Gettysburg expecting to fight the same fractured foe he humiliated at Chancellorsville two months before. He didn't expect to find them gathering at the high ground, waiting for him to try and knock them off.
https://www.historyonthenet.com/robert-e-lee-gettysburg-why-confederate-lost

Sears makes the story come alive in a way that harkens back to his first and most famous account of a Civil War campaign, Landscape Turned Red. It may be impossible to tell the story of Gettysburg in a way that’s less than engrossing, but Sears’s gift for detail and his sense for the humanity of his subjects made this one of the quickest 500-page books I have ever read.

What fueled the Confederate attack that led to Gettysburg, Sears writes, was pure hubris. Having had his way with his foe up and down the state of Virginia, Lee had become convinced his troops were unstoppable. Even more cocky was the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis:

It was the president’s thought to attach the vice president to Lee’s invading army as a sort of minister plenipotentiary. Indeed Mr. Davis could visualize thereby conquering a peace – the glorious moment when Lee’s army, having vanquished the foe on some Pennsylvania battlefield, would require the services of a peace commissioner.

Sears’s core contention is that kind of thinking directly fed the overreach that led to Lee’s most famous defeat. There were other factors, though, which Gettysburg elaborates upon.

Opposing Lee was Union General George Meade, who had just been appointed commander of the Army of the Potomac after elaborate machinations in Washington that brought down his predecessor. Fortunately for the North, Meade proved worthy of the job.
Image from https://npsgnmp.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/is-george-gordon-meades-prestige-as-the-victor-of-gettysburg-at-stake/ 

One I was aware of before reading the book was the absence of Lee’s horsemen. Jeb Stuart, the Rebel cavalry commander, was executing one of his famous rides around the Union Army, just as they were needed at the vanguard, reconnoitering Maryland and Pennsylvania. “Fast approaching a probable collision with the enemy, Lee was figuratively blindfolded,” Sears writes. But Lee kept moving north.

It surprised me more to learn just how vague and directionless Lee’s own command was, both just before and during the battle. With Jackson gone, he had new subcommanders for the most part. As the Confederates arrived at Gettysburg at the end of June, 1863, Lee’s usual pre-battle consultations to them were conspicuously absent:

By thus leaving the opening moves of July 1 entirely to the discretion of his two new corps commanders, General Lee once again displayed a strangely passive frame of mind. He evidently saw no reason for concern. As he emphasized in a postwar conversation, he “did not know the Federal army was at Gettysburg, could not believe it…”

There is a lot to unpack in Gettysburg, from the strangely incremental way the battle unfolded and fed upon itself over the course of three days to the intense bravery on display from both sides.

Culp's Hill formed the far right flank of the Union defense on all three days of Gettysburg. To defend it, Sears writes, the U. S. XII Corps "took advantage of the wooded, rocky terrain to throw up breastworks and turn Culp's Hill into a citadel."
Painting by Edwin Forbes from https://www.nps.gov/gett/learn/historyculture/culps-hill.htm 

Sears is often very critical about the commanders. One Confederate general, William Pender, is faulted for his force’s failure to join an attack on Day 2 even though Sears notes in the next sentence that the man was mortally wounded that afternoon. Daniel Sickles, commander of the Union III Corps, is appropriately drubbed for exposing his flank at the Peach Orchard, but Sears also lays into Henry Slocum of the XII Corps and George Sykes of the V Corps, leaders whom other historians record as being competent.

I found the take on Lee most surprising. He is often criticized for Pickett’s Charge on Day 3, but Sears sees him at fault earlier and often. For example, Sears presents him failing to recognize Union entrenchments at Cemetery Ridge before ordering Pickett’s force to its doom. He entrusted his artillery to a subordinate, William N. Pendleton, whose haphazard planning failed them critically on Day 3.

In criticizing Lee, Sears often leans on James Longstreet, a corps commander who spoke negatively and at length about Lee in later life. Sears makes the point many times that Longstreet recommended against attacking, wanting the South to threaten Washington D. C. and trigger a Union response. Often trusted for his strategic advice by Lee, Longstreet was ignored here.

Union commander George Meade had been in his job for less than a week when the battle began. Sears notes his promotion was “the fifth command change in the Army of the Potomac within the past year,” though the army he took charge of was in better shape after Chancellorsville than it had been after earlier defeats at Fredericksburg and the Peninsula Campaign.

Like Longstreet, Meade wanted a battle royal elsewhere. But once the campaign found its way to Gettysburg, he quickly saw the importance of the moment. He made sure his soldiers did, too. “Corps and other commanders are authorized to order the instant death of any soldier who fails in his duty at this hour,” he announced on June 30.

Meade doesn’t escape criticism from Sears, who calls him “colorless.” Overall, though, he handled matters well enough by making a stand and holding his ground against intense attacks and despite the mistakes of subordinates. You get the feeling reading Sears that Meade mostly lucked out by catching Lee feeling so bold and ill-focused.

This may be the best written of Sears’s four major campaign histories. The characters are vibrantly detailed, infuriating and engaging, in Sears’s telling:

Brigadier General William “Extra Billy” Smith, sixty-five years old, at heart more politician than soldier, directed the column to halt at the town square. Extra Billy had served five terms in Congress and one term as governor of Virginia, and he could not resist an opportunity to address a crowd, whatever its sympathies might be. “My friends,” he began with good cheer, “how do you like this way of coming back to the Union?”

Sears’s descriptive paragraphs sometimes take on a mosaic-like quality:

Rose’s Woods was the theater of action now, and it was a nasty place in which to fight. The ground was uneven and rocky, and in the still, hot air thick streamers of battle smoke hung low among the trees. Men crouched or even lay down to try and see their foes; by its muzzle flashes an enemy became known.

Sears doesn’t lean into soldiers’s accounts the way he did in Landscape Turned Red, but he does use the added length of this book to good advantage, filling in details without bogging the narrative down with a hundred sidebars. The result is very focused, first-class battlefield reporting. Bruce Catton’s Glory Road may have the most unforgettable account of Gettysburg I’ve ever read, but the emphasis here is less on the bloodletting (though there is plenty of mind-blowing description there) than how the battle unfolded and why it resolved the way it did.

One thing Sears does here more than in the other books is focus more on the Confederate side of the story. He starts out addressing the Confederate situation, and only pulls back to the Northern Army of the Potomac, his usual ambit, after detailing Lee’s plans. It makes for a more rounded perspective.

So we see why Lee chose the attack he made (three mountain ranges running from Virginia to Pennsylvania offered cover), why he went for Pennsylvania (he wasn’t really after shoes, as legend says, so much as a way to force a piecemeal enemy attack), and why he was caught flatfooted meeting the Army of the Potomac where he did.  

Ultimately, he counted on too much going right. “Lee’s was potentially a workable plan, yet one that would require the perfect interlocking – and the perfect success – of each supporting element for it to work,” Sears explains.

For many Civil War and history buffs interested in Sears, I would recommend Gettysburg as a starting point, even if it chronologically covers a later period of the war from all his other campaign histories. What you get here is Sears at his most vivid, centered, and ultimately satisfying, producing a work of constant originality despite the well-trod ground it covers. Once you start it, it’s a book that can almost read itself.