High Tide At Gettysburg The Campaign In Pennsylvania

““Gettysburg had everything,” Henry S. Commager recently wrote. “It was the greatest battle ever fought on our continent; it boasts more heroic chapters than any other one battle. It was the high tide of the Confederacy.” This is the way Glenn Tucker has always seen it and this is the way he reports it in High Tide at Gettysburg. The story of Gettysburg has never been told better, perhaps never so well as in this volume. Glenn Tucker has the immediacy of a war correspondent on the spot along with the insights that come from painstaking research. The armies live again in his pages. In his big, generous book Glenn Tucker has room to follow Lee’s army up from Chancellorsville across Maryland into Pennsylvania. With Jackson recently killed, Lee had revamped his top command. When Meade’s men caught up with the Confederates and the two armies were probing to locate each other’s concentrations, Mr. Tucker’s account becomes sharper, more dramatic. His rapidly moving, vivid narrative of the three-day battle is filled with fascinating episodes and fresh, stimulating appraisals. Glenn Tucker is akin to Ernie Pyle in his interest in people. With him you meet Harry King Burgwyn, “boy colonel” of the 26th North Carolina, just turned twenty-one, who slugged it out with Col. Henry A. Morrow of the 24th Michigan until few survived on either side. You feel the patriotic surge of white-haired William Barksdale, who led his Mississippians on the “grandest charge of the war” and died as he broke the Federal line. You sense the magnetism of Hancock the Superb, and feel the driving power of rugged Uncle John Sedgwick as he hurried his big VI Corps to the battlefield. With Old Man Greene you struggle in the darkness to save the Culp’s Hill trenches. And much more. Mr. Tucker weaves in many sharp thumbnail biographical sketches without slowing the action. Many North Carolinians, previously slighted, here receive their due. Full, dramatic, immediate, here is Gettysburg.”

Learn about the pivotal battle that changed the course of the American Civil War. In the summer of 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, fresh off a victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville, decided to invade Union territory. Taking his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania, Lee was drawn to a place where the area's major roads converged at Gettysburg. There, over seventy thousand Southern troops waged a dogged, bloody battle against over ninety thousand Union soldiers in the fields and on the boulder-strewn heights surrounding the town. Lee had a lot of faith in his troops. He nursed many hopes for the invasion, primarily engaging in peace negotiations by placing pressure on Washington, D.C. Within three days, those hopes and the future of the Southern cause lay battered on the Gettysburg battlefield, a defeat so crippling it signaled the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. This captivating guide tells the story of the Gettysburg campaign, from Lee's decision to invade to his retreat from the battlefield. In these pages, you'll read about acts of heroism, brilliant battlefield tactics, and horrible decisions that turned the tide of war. In this book, you'll learn about the following: The personal histories of generals and other major figures on both sides; The plight of the people of Gettysburg caught between two armies; The strategy Lee envisioned and the actual battle he was forced to fight; The significance of major landmarks on the Gettysburg battlefield; The scope and intensity of battlefield medical support; The post-war efforts to preserve the ground upon which America's bloodiest battle had been fought; The post-war lives of the major participants in the campaign; The politics underlying major strategic decisions; The truth about myths surrounding the fighting; And so much more!

For good reason, the second and third days of the Battle of Gettysburg have received the lion's share of attention from historians. With this book, however, the critical first day's fighting finally receives its due. After sketching the background of the Gettysburg campaign and recounting the events immediately preceding the battle, Harry Pfanz offers a detailed tactical description of events of the first day. He describes the engagements in McPherson Woods, at the Railroad Cuts, on Oak Ridge, on Seminary Ridge, and at Blocher's Knoll, as well as the retreat of Union forces through Gettysburg and the Federal rally on Cemetery Hill. Throughout, he draws on deep research in published and archival sources to challenge many long-held assumptions about the battle.

A single day: July 4, 1863, brought to a conclusion two of the most infamous battles of the Civil War. This book tells the story of these two pivotal battles.

There is “never a dull moment” in this “excellent account” of an overlooked Confederate triumph during the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg (San Francisco Book Review). While many Civil War buffs celebrate Picket’s Charge as the climactic moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Confederate Army’s true high point had come the afternoon before. When Longstreet’s corps triumphantly entered the battle, the Federals just barely held on. The foremost Rebel spearhead on that second day of the battle was Brig. Gen. William Barksdale’s Mississippi brigade, which launched what one Union observer called the “grandest charge that was ever seen by mortal man.” On the second day of Gettysburg, the Federal left was not as vulnerable as Lee had envisioned, but had cooperated with Rebel wishes by extending its Third Corps into a salient. When Longstreet finally gave Barksdale the go-ahead, the Mississippians utterly crushed the peach orchard salient and continued marauding up to Cemetery Ridge. Hancock, Meade, and other Union generals had to gather men from four different corps to try to stem the onslaught. Barksdale himself was killed at the apex of his advance. Darkness, as well as Confederate exhaustion, finally ended the day’s fight as the shaken, depleted Federal units took stock. They had barely held on against the full ferocity of the Rebels on a day that would decide the fate of the nation.

In the spring of 1864, in the vast Virginia scrub forest known as the Wilderness, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee first met in battle. The Wilderness campaign of May 5-6 initiated an epic confrontation between these two Civil War commanders--one that would finally end, eleven months later, with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The eight essays here assembled explore aspects of the background, conduct, and repercussions of the fighting in the Wilderness. Through an often-revisionist lens, contributors to this volume focus on topics such as civilian expectations for the campaign, morale in the two armies, and the generalship of Lee, Grant, Philip H. Sheridan, Richard S. Ewell, A. P. Hill, James Longstreet, and Lewis A. Grant. Taken together, these essays revise and enhance existing work on the battle, highlighting ways in which the military and nonmilitary spheres of war intersected in the Wilderness. The contributors: --Peter S. Carmichael, 'Escaping the Shadow of Gettysburg: Richard S. Ewell and Ambrose Powell Hill at the Wilderness' --Gary W. Gallagher, 'Our Hearts Are Full of Hope: The Army of Northern Virginia in the Spring of 1864' --John J. Hennessy, 'I Dread the Spring: The Army of the Potomac Prepares for the Overland Campaign' --Robert E. L. Krick, 'Like a Duck on a June Bug: James Longstreet's Flank Attack, May 6, 1864' --Robert K. Krick, ''Lee to the Rear,' the Texans Cried' --Carol Reardon, 'The Other Grant: Lewis A. Grant and the Vermont Brigade in the Battle of the Wilderness' --Gordon C. Rhea, 'Union Cavalry in the Wilderness: The Education of Philip H. Sheridan and James H. Wilson' --Brooks D. Simpson, 'Great Expectations: Ulysses S. Grant, the Northern Press, and the Opening of the Wilderness Campaign'