Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
are supposed to be the altar of gratitude. However, I cannot help noticing how often they serve more or less the same purpose as the cocktail party to the social climber, as a place to issue noisy salutes to a checklist of celebrities with whom one is eager to be associated. I have no such parade of cultural mandarins to wave up onto my little stage, and probably not even much of a stage. But this makes me all the more uncommonly grateful to those from whom help has unstintingly come. I single out in particular my office staffers in Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College: Cathy Bain first, and then my faithful note-card transcribers, Lauren Roedner and Tim Koenig. I have benefited delightfully from discussions and exchanges of documents with John Rudy, Eric Wittenberg, Scott Mingus, and Charles Tarbox. Troy Harman, John Heiser, and Scott Hartwig of the Gettysburg National Military Park have been unflaggingly helpful. And for patience beyond the measure of Job, I must thank the happy few who read through each chapter for me as they appeared, and commented on them: Scott Bowden, Joe Bilby, Charles Teague, Gregory Urwin, and Ted Alexander. Zach Fry and Jason Frawley freely allowed me to use research material that is, as yet, unpublished by them. William A. Frassanito not only provided me with access to a number of the rare photographs in his collection, but also gave highly useful advice on the selection of images as a whole.

I want also to hail the cooperation of a number of libraries and collections in accessing manuscript collections, including the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Library of Congress, the Museum of the Confederacy, the New-York Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, Special Collections in the Musselman Library at Gettysburg College, the Adams County
Historical Society, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the library of the Gettysburg National Military Park, and Bowdoin College. Gettysburg College and Princeton University united in funding a yearlong sabbatical during the 2010–11 academic year, during which I served as the William Garwood Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton. Bringing the manuscript out of its chrysalis state and into full wingspread has been the unceasing labor of my glorious agent, Michele Rubin of Writers House, and Andrew Miller, my editor at Random House. The
Gettysburg Magazine
published an early version of some of my thinking on the tactical context of the battle as “Some Unturned Corners of the Battle of Gettysburg” in its July 2011 issue.

Above all, I salute as gracefully and handsomely as I can the patience and good humor of my beloved wife, Debra, and our three now-grown children, Jerusha Mast, Alexandra Fanucci, and Jonathan Guelzo, all of whom have tolerated days, weeks, and months of an unresponsive and abstracted paterfamilias, his mind wandering somewhere over rocky hills and golden fields, toward a small knot of trees on a distant horizon.

This is a book about a nineteeth-century battle. That fact alone calls forward a number of caveats, beginning with the arrangement of hours and minutes in these chapters. America in the 1860s knew nothing about synchronized time. Clocks and watches were set by light and dark; there were no time zones, no standardized time-measurement schemes. Even meticulous timekeepers relied on the sound of church bells or public clocks for uniformity. Of course, in the middle of the battle, few people were noticing bells, if they were being rung at all, and few were likely to be listening for the cheerful chiming of a courthouse clock. Soldiers set their personal watches by their own estimates, and in battle, those lacking watches were reduced to little more than a hazardous guess about the time. This is a long way of saying that the times cited in this book are entirely the reckoning and responsibility of the author; but the vagaries of timekeeping in 1863 were so great that even I must protest having to share too much of the responsibility. The participants themselves tried to establish some rough sense of the timing of the battle’s events, and sometimes I have accepted their estimates or time notations, but always with the question in mind:
Could this really have happened at that time?

The same is true concerning the maps that appear in this book; they, too, are entirely the reckoning and responsibility of the author. But they, too, suffer from the uncertainties of the battle’s participants about where they were and what landmarks were nearby. Maps in both armies were in short and uncoordinated supply, and local place-names were swapped around by
soldiers with an unsteady abandon (it is estimated that Little Round Top was called by as many as nine different names in after-action reports, simply because the officers composing those reports had only the most slender information about what names the locals attached to them). Names for local landmarks shifted from telling to telling: the Lutheran Theological Seminary was frequently mistaken for Pennsylvania College, and vice versa; the road leading southwest from Gettysburg is usually known as the Fairfield Road, but sometimes is referred to as the Hagerstown Road, while the road leading west to Cashtown is frequently called the Cashtown Pike
and
the Chambersburg Pike; the road from the northeast used by Jubal Early’s division on July 1st was alternately referred to as the Old Harrisburg Road
and
the Heidlersburg Road (I have opted to use the latter); Baltimore Street in the town of Gettysburg becomes the Baltimore Pike as soon as it leaves the environs of Gettysburg, just as York Street becomes the York Pike. The greatest confusion is liable to occur concerning the Cashtown Pike versus Chambersburg Pike usage, so let me say here that I have simply settled on calling the west road the Cashtown Pike. Other geographical points also suffer from name-swapping: Herbst’s Woods is frequently spoken of as McPherson’s Woods, but in fact, the woods belonged to John Herbst and only bordered the Edward McPherson property. Oak Hill is a large prominence north and west of Gettysburg, but it has a south-running spur known as Oak Ridge which is geologically distinct, and so I have rigorously segregated the
Hill
for the hill and the
Ridge
for the ridge. The same distinction applies to the more famous Cemetery
Hill
and Cemetery
Ridge.