Revisionist study of Gen. Robert E. Lee's true tactical plan for Gettysburg: his intention, throughout the battle, to converge his forces upon and to seize Cemetery Hill on the Union center. The author centers his study around a set of commonly held beliefs, among them a mistaken interpretation of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's goals for the battle.
For almost 100 years, analysis of the Gettysburg Campaign has centered around an oversimplified view of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's goals for the battle. Lee's Real Plan at Gettysburg presents a provocative new theory regarding Lee's true tactical objectives during this pivotal battle of the American Civil War.
“Thanks to Tom Carhart's painstaking and absorbing reconstruction of events, we now have a clear comprehension of what Lee planned for July 3—and why it went wrong.”—James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom This is a fresh and fascinating new look at one of the most pivotal moments in American history: the Battle of Gettysburg, when Union forces repelled the brilliant Robert E. Lee, who had already thrashed a long line of Federal opponents—just as he was poised at the back door of the nation’s capital. Conventional wisdom holds that Lee made one profoundly wrong decision on the last day of the battle—launching “Pickett’s Charge” uphill across an open field against the heart of the Union defense. But why would he have employed only a fifth of his forces at such a crucial moment? Now, Tom Carhart offers a bold thesis—that Lee’s heretofore unknown strategy at Gettysburg was to combine Pickett’s frontal attack with a daring rear assault by the great Jeb Stuart to break the Union Army in half. Only in the battle’s final hours was Stuart stopped by a force half the size of his own, led by a young, unproven general—George Armstrong Custer—who helped turn the tide of the war. Destined to be controversial, Lost Triumph is a provocative reassessment of this monumental battle and a vivid, indispensable contribution to Civil War literature.
In a groundbreaking, comprehensive history of the Army of Northern Virginia's retreat from Gettysburg in July 1863, Kent Masterson Brown draws on previously untapped sources to chronicle the massive effort of General Robert E. Lee and his command as they sought to move people, equipment, and scavenged supplies through hostile territory and plan the army's next moves. Brown reveals that even though the battle of Gettysburg was a defeat for the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee's successful retreat maintained the balance of power in the eastern theater and left his army with enough forage, stores, and fresh meat to ensure its continued existence as an effective force.
This “very satisfying blow-by-blow account of the final stages of the Gettysburg Campaign” fills an important gap in Civil War history (Civil War Books and Authors). Winner of the Gettysburg Civil War Round Table Book Award This fascinating book exposes what has been hiding in plain sight for 150 years: The Gettysburg Campaign did not end at the banks of the Potomac on July 14, but deep in central Virginia two weeks later along the line of the Rappahannock. Contrary to popular belief, once Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia slipped across the Potomac back to Virginia, the Lincoln administration pressed George Meade to cross quickly in pursuit—and he did. Rather than follow in Lee’s wake, however, Meade moved south on the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains in a cat-and-mouse game to outthink his enemy and capture the strategic gaps penetrating the high wooded terrain. Doing so would trap Lee in the northern reaches of the Shenandoah Valley and potentially bring about the decisive victory that had eluded Union arms north of the Potomac. The two weeks that followed resembled a grand chess match with everything at stake—high drama filled with hard marching, cavalry charges, heavy skirmishing, and set-piece fighting that threatened to escalate into a major engagement with the potential to end the war in the Eastern Theater. Throughout, one thing remains clear: Union soldiers from private to general continued to fear the lethality of Lee’s army. Meade and Lee After Gettysburg, the first of three volumes on the campaigns waged between the two adversaries from July 14 through the end of July, 1863, relies on the official records, regimental histories, letters, newspapers, and other sources to provide a day-by-day account of this fascinating high-stakes affair. The vivid prose, coupled with original maps and outstanding photographs, offers a significant contribution to Civil War literature. Named Eastern Theater Book of the Year byCivil War Books and Authors
Civil War historians have long been puzzled by Pickett’s seemingly suicidal frontal attack on the Union center at Gettysburg. Here, for the first time, Paul D. Walker reveals Robert E. Lee’s true plan for victory at Gettysburg: a simultaneous strike against the Union center from the front and rear—Pickett’s infantry to charge the front, while Stuart’s cavalry struck the rear. The frontal assault by Pickett went off as scheduled, but as Stuart’s forces approached from the rear, they encountered a Union cavalry contingent. As the forces joined, the Union cavalry leader was quickly killed, and command fell to one of the most dynamic figures in American history—George Armstrong Custer. What followed was America’s greatest cavalry battle: 7,500 Confederate horsemen ranged against 5,000 Union cavalry, Jeb Stuart against George Custer, with the outcome of the Civil War at stake.
It has long been a trope of Civil War history that Gettysburg was an accidental battlefield. General Lee, the old story goes, marched blindly into Pennsylvania while his chief cavalryman Jeb Stuart rode and raided incommunicado. Meanwhile, General Meade, in command only a few days, gave uncertain chase to an enemy whose exact positions he did not know. And so these ignorant armies clashed by first light at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. In the spirit of his iconoclastic Lee’s Real Plan at Gettysburg, Troy D. Harman argues for a new interpretation: once Lee invaded Pennsylvania and the Union army pursued, a battle at Gettysburg was entirely predictable, perhaps inevitable. Most Civil War battles took place along major roads, railroads, and waterways; the armies needed to move men and equipment, and they needed water for men, horses, and artillery. And yet this perspective hasn’t been fully explored when it comes to Gettysburg. Look at an 1863 map, says Harman: look at the area framed in the north by the Susquehanna River and in the south by the Potomac, in the east by the Northern Central Railroad and in the west by the Cumberland Valley Railroad. This is where the armies played a high-stakes game of chess in late June 1863. Their movements were guided by strategies of caution and constrained by roads, railroads, mountains and mountain passes, rivers and creeks, all of which led the armies to Gettysburg. It’s true that Lee was disadvantaged by Stuart’s roaming and Meade by his newness to command, which led both to default to the old strategic and logistical bedrocks they learned at West Point—and these instincts helped reinforce the magnetic pull toward Gettysburg. Moreover, once the battle started, Harman argues, the blue and gray fought tactically for the two creeks—Marsh and Rock, essential for watering men and horses and sponging artillery—that mark the battlefield in the east and the west as well as for the roadways that led to Gettysburg from all points of the compass. This is a perspective often overlooked in many accounts of the battle, which focus on the high ground—the Round Tops, Cemetery Hill—as key tactical objectives. Gettysburg Ranger and historian Troy Harman draws on a lifetime of researching the Civil War and more than thirty years of studying the terrain of Gettysburg and south-central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland to reframe the story of the Battle of Gettysburg. In the process he shows there’s still much to say about one of history’s most written-about battles. This is revisionism of the best kind.
Harsh attempts to discover what they believed their responsibilities were and what they tried to accomplish; to evaluate the human and logistical resources at their disposal; and to determine what they knew and when they learned it."--BOOK JACKET.
As intelligence experts have long asserted, ÒInformation in regard to the enemy is the indispensable basis of all military plans.Ó Despite the thousands of books and articles written about Gettysburg, Tom RyanÕs groundbreaking Spies, Scouts, and Secrets in the Gettysburg Campaign: How the Critical Role of Intelligence Impacted the Outcome of LeeÕs Invasion of the North, June - July 1863 is the first to offer a unique and incisive comparative study of intelligence operations during what many consider the warÕs decisive campaign. Based upon years of indefatigable research, the author evaluates how Gen. Robert E. Lee used intelligence resources, including cavalry, civilians, newspapers, and spies to gather information about Union activities during his invasion of the North in June and July 1863, and how this information guided LeeÕs decision-making. Simultaneously, Ryan explores the effectiveness of the Union Army of the PotomacÕs intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Both Maj. Gens. Joe Hooker and George G. Meade relied upon cavalry, the Signal Corps, and an intelligence staff known as the Bureau of Military Information that employed innovative concepts to gather, collate, and report vital information from a variety of sources. The result is an eye-opening, day-by-day analysis of how and why the respective army commanders implemented their strategy and tactics, with an evaluation of their respective performance as they engaged in a battle of wits to learn the enemyÕs location, strength, and intentions. Spies, Scouts, and Secrets in the Gettysburg Campaign is grounded upon a broad foundation of archival research and a firm understanding of the theater of operations that specialists will especially value. Everyone will appreciate reading about a familiar historic event from a perspective that is both new and enjoyable. One thing is certain: no one will close this book and look at the Gettysburg Campaign in the same way again.
