Gettysburg: The Tide Turns: An Oral History

“Gettysburg: The Tide Turns . . . ‘brings in the people who were part of the story, large and small in importance, to tell it.’”

Oral histories of wars and battles are necessarily selective because not every participant wrote or spoke about events, and not everything written or spoken about such events survived for the benefit of historians. The best oral histories give us a sense of how events were perceived at the time they occurred or shortly thereafter. As historian Bruce Chadwick explains in his new book Gettysburg: The Tide Turns, oral history “brings in the people who were part of the story, large and small in importance, to tell it.” Chadwick accomplishes that admirably in this book.

The Battle of Gettysburg was the largest, costliest battle of the American Civil War, fought over three days in south-central Pennsylvania. It was the culmination of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s second and last invasion of the north, an invasion that Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis hoped would convince northerners that the war needed to end, even if that meant forever dividing the Union and perpetuating slavery. Historians still debate the true significance of Gettysburg, and Chadwick sides with those who view it as “turning the tide” of the war in the Union’s favor.

Chadwick, as he did in his previous book The Cannons Roar about the origins of the Civil War, provides a concise narrative interspersed with excerpts of letters, comments, official reports of Confederate and Union political leaders, commanders, soldiers, diarists, civilians in Gettysburg, and a sprinkling of journalists who covered the battle and historians who have written about it.

As Confederate troops entered Pennsylvania, some of them expressed surprise that civilians showed little fear and didn’t hesitate to express their Union sympathies. Confederate Gen. John Gordon described the farmlands, barns, and stone mansions of Gettysburg as “interesting and enchanting,” noting the “broad green meadows with luxuriant grasses and crystal springs.” The evening before the battle’s first day, a resident of Union Mills observed campfires “burning all over the hills” and prayed that “our dear Lord will protect us, and our Blessed Mother will watch over us.”

There was no plan on either side to fight at Gettysburg. The roads in the region converged there. Confederates needed supplies. Gen. Lee wanted to fight a battle somewhere across the Potomac River, but he was moving “blind” in enemy territory because J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry’s whereabouts were unknown. Union commander Gen. George Meade, who was just appointed to head the Army of the Potomac on June 28, discovered thanks to Union Gen. John Buford that Lee’s army was headed to Gettysburg. Buford decided to fight a holding action on July 1, 1863, until Union Gen. John Reynolds could bring up infantry to the ridges of Gettysburg.

Chadwick shows that confusion reigned on both sides. And once the fighting began, troops from both sides were attracted to Gettysburg like magnets. Some civilians in the town left their homes, while others hunkered down and watched troops on both sides arrive. Soon, Chadwick writes, the “sprawling farmland of Gettysburg that looked so serene a few days ago would be drenched in blood from both sides. It would quickly become an open-air hospital.”

The names of the places on the battlefield would soon become legendary: Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Hill, Seminary Ridge, McPherson’s Barn, Willougby Run, Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Little Round Top. So would the names of the commanders: Lee and Longstreet, Armistead and Pickett, Meade and Hancock, Reynolds and Sickles. So would certain regiments: the 26th North Carolina, the 20th Maine, the 1st Minnesota, the Iron Brigade.

After the first day of battle which Lee viewed as a Confederate success, Union troops held the “high ground on Cemetery Ridge positioned in the shape of a fishhook. Lee was determined to attack the next day despite opposition from Longstreet who counseled moving around the Union line and fighting a defensive battle on ground of their choosing. The Confederate attacks on July 2nd and 3rd failed at great cost, and Lee and other rebel generals thought Longstreet was deliberately delaying attacks. Longstreet also had his defenders, but after the war he would receive much of the blame for the defeat at Gettysburg.

Chadwick’s oral history is at its best when he quotes soldiers about the nature of the fighting. A 20th Maine private recalled “the terrible medley of shouts, cheers, groans, prayers, curses, bursting shells, whizzing riddle-bullets, and clanging steel” on Little Round Top. A private with the 22nd Massachusetts described the fighting in the Wheatfield as “a perfect hell on earth.” A lieutenant with the 62nd Pennsylvania said “the bullets were whistling all the time” in Wheatfield. After the second day’s fighting, a Union soldier said the rebel dead “were piled in lines like windrows of hay.”

The desperate Confederate assault on the Union center on the third day of battle—known as Pickett’s Charge—was preceded by a massive artillery attack from 150 or so cannons. Then, Union soldiers looked in awe as more than 12,000 rebel troops emerged from the woods on Seminary Ridge and began to cross the open fields on their way to Cemetery Ridge. One soldier from New Jersey described it as “the grandest sight I have ever seen . . . their bayonets glistening in the sun, from right to left as far as the eye could see.” A Union captain remembered the “movement of such a force over such a field, in such perfect order, to such a destiny, was grand beyond expression.”

But the fate of those Confederate troops was not grand. First long-range artillery thinned their ranks. Then as the gray lines got closer to the Union position, they were decimated by hails of infantry fire. The attack was a costly failure, as Gen. Longstreet had predicted. Lee blamed himself and ordered a retreat. Gen. Meade, much to the dismay of President Lincoln, did not try to stop the retreat. The Civil War’s deadliest battle was over.

Chadwick concludes his oral history with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which promised a “new birth of freedom” won by those who “gave the last full measure of devotion” on the fields of Gettysburg.