Gettysburg Heroes

Glenn W. Lafantasie

Description

How Gettysburg shaped the lives of the Civil War generation

The Civil War generation saw its world in ways startlingly different from our own. In these essays, Glenn W. LaFantasie examines the lives and experiences of several key personalities who gained fame during the war and after. The battle of Gettysburg is the thread that ties these Civil War lives together. Gettysburg was a personal turning point, though each person was affected differently. Largely biographical in its approach, the book captures the human drama of the war and shows how this group of individuals—including Abraham Lincoln, James Longstreet, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, William C. Oates, and others—endured or succumbed to the war and, willingly or unwillingly, influenced its outcome. At the same time, it shows how the war shaped the lives of these individuals, putting them through ordeals they never dreamed they would face or survive.

Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Lee's Old War Horse
2. Frank A. Haskell: Tragic Hero of the Union
3. Becoming Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
4. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the American Dream
5. Finding William C. Oates
6. An Alabamian's Civil War
7. Hell in Haymarket
8. William C. Oates and the Death of General Farnsworth
9. Mr. Lincoln's Victory at Gettysburg
10. Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening
11. Memories of Little Round Top
12. Ike and Monty Take Gettysburg
13. The Many Meanings of Gettysburg
14. Feeling the Past at Gettysburg
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Civil War Period
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Military
• History of the Americas
• American Civil War
• United States
• Civil War
• Guerre de Sécession

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 05 février 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253000170
• Langue: English

Extrait

Gettysburg Heroes
GLENN W. L A FANTASIE
Gettysburg Heroes
Perfect Soldiers, Hallowed Ground
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
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2008 by Glenn W. LaFantasie
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LaFantasie, Glenn W.
Gettysburg heroes : perfect soldiers, hallowed ground / Glenn W. LaFantasie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35071-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863-Influence.
2. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863-Biography. 3. United States-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Biography. 4. Generals-United States-Biography. 5. Soldiers-United States-Biography. 6. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863-Social aspects. 7. United States-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Social aspects. I. Title.
E475.53.L235 2008
973.7 349-dc22
2007032473
1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09 08
For Donna M. Hayes and Ryan T. Hayes
The Civil War is not ended;
I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.
T. S. ELIOT
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Lee s Old War Horse
2. Frank A. Haskell: Tragic Hero of the Union
3. Becoming Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
4. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the American Dream
5. Finding William C. Oates
6. An Alabamian s Civil War
7. Hell in Haymarket
8. William C. Oates and the Death of General Farnsworth
9. Mr. Lincoln s Victory at Gettysburg
10. Lincoln and the Gettysburg Awakening
11. Memories of Little Round Top
12. Ike and Monty Take Gettysburg
13. The Many Meanings of Gettysburg
14. Feeling the Past at Gettysburg
Notes
Index
Preface
In the wake of the Republican national convention that nominated him as the party s presidential candidate in 1860, Abraham Lincoln learned that a publishing house was planning to issue an unauthorized biography of him. Lincoln reassured a fellow prominent Republican that wholly [on] my own, I would authorize no biography, without time, and opertunity to carefully examine and consider every word of it; and, in this case, in the nature of things, I can have no such time and opertunity. As a result, he refused to approve the book. Lincoln rightly feared the benefits that might befall his opponents if hundreds of pages of unauthorized text appeared about him in the public domain. Since 1860, hundreds of Lincoln biographies have been published, most of which have added steadily to his lustrous reputation, so in that light, and as far as the judgment of posterity is concerned, his worries seem to have been unfounded. Indeed, Civil War biographies in general are a popular genre, and this book, in its own way, adds to the long shelf of works devoted to the lives and careers of those Americans who participated in the nation s worst-and bloodiest-cataclysm. I even have something to say about Lincoln, and not all of it is necessarily complimentary, although my esteem for him-the greatest of all American presidents-remains unalterably high, as these pages make plain.
The essays collected here, most of which have been previously published in magazines and journals (although I have revised each of them and brought them all up to date), reflect my own interest in biography and how it enhances our understanding of the Civil War era. The whole value of history, of biography, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1838, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. Emerson comes close to expressing my own view of the usefulness of biography, for I have learned a great deal from the individuals I have studied and written about. Many of those life lessons, in fact, have little to do necessarily with the Civil War or my focal point, the battle of Gettysburg. Instead, I have delighted in coming to know these figures from the past-some great, some obscure, but all of whom have revealed themselves to be very human in their responses to the worst crisis they would ever know as Americans and as individuals.
Seeing what men can be and do, as Emerson put it, has impressed, astounded, and humbled me. Getting to know these historical figures over the past twenty years has given me endless insights into the nature of their world, the contours of their individual lives, and the vast dimensions of the Civil War and its many effects on American society. I have immensely enjoyed the company of these men, even when that has meant coping with the terrible things they witnessed and the awful experiences they endured. They have taught me much about fortitude, sacrifice, and courage. But they have also opened up new vistas for me about the modern world they brought into being and about my own place in it.
Like most other modern biographers, I am keenly aware that in the process of writing about people from the past I have forged my own relationship with them, if only by deciding what I want to say about them and which episodes in their lives have enthralled me enough to discuss them in print. As a biographer, I can claim, like the boy in M. Night Shyamalan s brilliant film The Sixth Sense, to see dead people, but they don t appear to me as apparitions, only in dusty records and faded manuscripts. And they don t talk to me. I have to pull their words out of texts that are often set down in nearly indecipherable handwriting or are buried in yellowing stacks of manuscripts and newspapers. Yet every biographer must be conscious of the unconscious, always aware, in other words, of what might lurk behind one s subject and behind one s deep fascination with him. In answering these questions about biography as an art and as an experience, I have learned something new about myself. These historical figures, then, have not simply taught me about their own lives. They have, in the end, illuminated my own. And they have revealed some provocative answers as to why I find the past so welcoming a place.
Biography is more than research, more than scholarship. It is more than lining up the facts of a subject s life and recounting them in their proper order. It is more than the interpretations one uses to give those facts meaning. Biography involves something of the heart, some intangible and almost irrational connection to the past that intimately links the historian to his subject and, as a result, makes him part of what he is studying. There is no escaping it. It happens to every biographer, although not every practitioner of the art is always entirely conscious of it or willing to admit its prevalence or force. Some biographers-the cave dwellers of the profession-even deny its existence. But it s no use. The emotional attachment is there, carrying you farther into the past and into the lives of the people you are examining than you might even care to go, like a drill into the earth s crust that will not stop its spiral, and it ultimately takes you down deeper and deeper until it-and not you alone-defines the scope and breadth of your exploration. James Atlas, the renowned editor and biographer, says a biographer must inhabit his subject s life. It sounds like good advice, but no biographer can actually become his subject-nor should he try. The best we can do, the most I have tried to do, is to walk in their shoes, see their world as they saw it, and realize, in the process, that a great gulf always separates our present from their past. The gulf can be bridged. But it can never carry us body and soul into the past. We must be content with inhabiting our own lives as we struggle to comprehend those who came before us.
* * *
The subtitle of this book is meant to be ironic. There were no perfect soldiers in the Civil War or at Gettysburg, although there were thousands who were certainly brave and true. Perfect heroes were conspicuously absent from the field at Gettysburg, as they are from every battlefield, every war. Every soldier, nevertheless, likes to think he is perfect. To be sure, James Longstreet, Frank A. Haskell, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and William C. Oates all thought of themselves in terms of perfection, despite the fact that all of them admitted to making mistakes at Gettysburg. In their memory, though, they became increasingly perfect as time went on and as their errors faded or, in some cases, as they completely disappeared from view. Except for Haskell, who died in combat at Cold Harbor, this view of themselves grew with each passing year, as I suppose it always does in the mind of every soldier who survives a war. In their remembrances, they became more heroic, more audacious, more capable than they had actually been in the hellish midst of combat. Looking back, they marveled at their own accomplishments, suppressed their worst moments and fears, and defended their actions, whatever the actual outcome of those actions had been in the summer of 1863. Almost a centu