The Killer Angels, and the Battle of Gettysburg Sesquicentennial

(Published at The Journal of Popular Culture)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wP9FW3PNm0VKlI4-clegczbdfABGTKiV/view?usp=sharing

IN HIS 2001 BOOK RACE AND REUNION: THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICAN

Memory, David W. Blight argues that popular memory of the Civil War “remains very difficult to shuck from its shell of sentimentalism. Over time, Americans have needed deflections from the deeper meanings of the Civil War. It haunts us still” (4). In his

recent article from The Chronicle Review, Blight articulates a hope that

in this upcoming 150th year commemoration “the fighting of the Civil War

itself should not unite us in pathos and nostalgia alone; but maybe,

just maybe, we will give ourselves the chance to find unity in a shared history of conflict, in a genuine sense of tragedy, and in a conflicted memory stared squarely in the face” (3).

Surely many people hope that the racism and focus on military valor that tinged the centennial commemoration will not dominate the upcoming sesquicentennial, but, unfortunately, the popular versions of the war, its people, rationales, and most famous battles will continue to infect the upcoming commemoration.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania will surely be a popular site to visit in the coming years and a focus for many people to cultivate their interest in the war’s most famous battle. By 2013, plans for battle reenactments will have been laid, more novels with Gettysburg as the

setting will have been published, new editions of classic works will be issued, and countless rituals will be performed to commemorate this seminal event in American history at this most sacred site in the war’s geography.

As We Look Back on the Battle, What Will We See?

Battle site visitors can stay at the Little Round Top Bed and Breakfast, dine at General Pickett’s All You Can Eat Buffet, and enjoy a beer at Gettysbrew micro-brewery, located in a farm that was once a Confederate field hospital. They can enjoy countless other Gettysburg

themed products including nightlights, key chains, lapel pins, and

t-shirts for sale near the site of the Battle. These products, most likely, will increase in popularity as the anniversary approaches.

While not a Civil War themed trinket or hair scrunchy, Michael Shaara’s novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, is one extremely popular artifact that fits into a long tradition of marketing the war in simple and sentimental ways. Shaara’s version of the Battle cultivates a saleable commodity because his does not complicate or disrupt popular understandings of the Battle or the war in general.

The Killer Angels follows in a popular tradition that began shortly

after the war. In most popular artifacts that have used the war as their setting, the focus has been on military action, and this focus has distracted from the complex consequences of the war. Instead, popular artifacts produced after the conflict encourage white Northerners and white Southerners to forge a union across a great and bitter divide. Before the war, nationalism was not clearly defined, and during the war sectional differences were affirmed. Carl Degler points out that the Civil War “was not a struggle to save a failed Union, but to create a nation that until then had not come into being” (qtd. in Parish117). During the war, many publications sought to define sectional nationalism against the competing section (Fahs 25). After the war, many popular publications focused on the military conflict while avoiding the social ramifications and complicated causes of the war

(Blight, Race 175). This contributed to a partial unification of the former adversaries but has also distracted from more robust reflections on the conflict. The use of print to foster national unity has been ongoing since the end of the war.

Benedict Anderson calls modern nations “imagined communities” in which national identity is partially defined through print. In the South and the North a variety of artifacts were published during the war to espouse justifications for fighting. Afterwards, mass publishing

encouraged unification. A unifying literature that represents a way of life, a region, and a cause worth defending may have encouraged many people to not only kill but to die for their idea of a nation in both the South and the North during the war. But, afterwards, unification seems to have been the goal even when that unification came at a price.

In its aftermath, the war was regarded in popular culture as a “test of manhood” by most Americans; the meaning and causes of the war receded in collective memory (Blight, “Origins” 123). In popular entertainment, the conflict was transferred to an arena of romance and heroic battle where the threat to disunion was never great and where

the consequences of the war were hardly interrogated. The romantic memory of the war was efficiently distributed within a few decades after the conflict and would influence generations of popular cultural artifacts including Shaara’s The Killer Angels. When the conflict has been described in popular culture, soldiers of both sides are most

often recognized for heroism. There is no enemy.

Between 1884 and 1887, the popular magazine Century published the War Series which included hundreds of articles about the war by Union and Confederate soldiers, mostly officers. These articles were embellished with drawings, engravings, and elaborate illustrations. In1888 Century released a four-volume collection of these accounts

called Battles and Leaders of the Civil War with each volume running

to approximately 750 pages. One Century editor wrote that he sought veterans who would share a “non-political point of view” and recollect in ways amenable to both sides “to soften controversy” (Johnson qtd. in Blight, Race 175). Johnson later wrote “On the whole Battles

and Leaders of the Civil War is a monument to American bravery, persistence and resourcefulness, and has the additional distinction of having struck the keynote of national unity through tolerance and the promotion of goodwill.” Articles by veterans, Johnson argued, celebrated “the skill and valor of both sides” in order to “contribute

toward reuniting the country by the cultivation of mutual respect” (qtd. in Waugh 23). These four popular volumes literally and figuratively united the combatants.

The focus on battle to foster unification continued to flourish in popular literature well after the war. Anderson writes of the “vast pedagogical industry” that “works ceaselessly to oblige young Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861–65 as a great ‘civil’

war between ‘brothers’ rather than—as they briefly were—two sovereign nation-states” (201). These two nation-states reunited not as a matter of happenstance; nor was the reunification facilitated through military might. Popular literature did much of the work that

politicians and the military could not.

Postwar novels, plays, articles, poems, and, eventually, films and computer games facilitated reunion through a near obsessive focus on the battlefield action of the war evinced by—but not exclusive to—Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. This tradition continues to shape popular artifacts about the war. When battlefield action is described

in this tradition, it is most commonly done in sentimental and antiseptic ways because, Blight argues, “reunion could only afford to incorporate a small allotment of blood and terror into its story of renewal and mutual glory” (Blight, Race 240). Some writing by veterans is critical, disturbing, and unsentimental. Veterans Ambrose Bierce and Albion Tourgee wrote scathing attacks on reconciliation literature and challenged romantic depictions of battle. Their voices were in the minority, however.

Veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. articulated what came to be the dominant motif of postwar public address and literature: reconciliation through celebration of martial duty. In a Memorial Day 1895 speech to Harvard’s graduating class titled The Soldiers’ Faith, Holmes argues that war was an irreplaceable and inexplicable inspiration of the “passion for life.” In other texts he wrote of the gore he witnessed and violence in which he participated (Wilson 750–51), but in this address and elsewhere, he still comes to the conclusion that:

"I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he does not see the use." (64)

In this “soldiers’ faith” the soldier is to prove valorous regardless of the cause. In President Woodrow Wilson’s commemorative address at the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, he reiterated a similar theme to the assembled crowd of Union and Confederate veterans and thousands of spectators gathered at the Battle site. Rather

than drawing attention to ongoing civil rights struggles and the lingering aftermath of the war still present in 1913, he focused on the “splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other’s eyes.

How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men!” (23–25). In this view, sentimental martial celebration crossed sectional divides to unite the nation. Though many pilgrims to Gettysburg in 2013 will not be familiar with Holmes or Wilson’s words, the tradition that they represent will be familiar; this tradition is bolstered by popular narratives about the Battle and about the war in general.

Gross racist caricatures and arguments for the virtues of slavery that were once common are no longer acceptable in popular culture. However, focusing on soldiers and their “adorable” faith has continued at some price to the nation’s ability to reflect on the war. The Killer Angels continues this popular tradition of focusing on the military conflict at the expense of interrogating the war’s causes and consequences.

Currently, there are more than two and a half million copies of The Killer Angels in print, and it is arguably the most widely read book about the Battle of Gettysburg (Hartwig 1). As the anniversary of the Battle approaches, the popularity of the novel may increase and

more students will likely see it on their reading lists. Special editions may be issued and attention to the novel and its representation of the Battle will, no doubt, gain significant attention. Of course, readers recognize that the novel is fiction as they do with other Civil War novels like The Red Badge of Courage or Gone with the Wind, but

“something in The Killer Angels elicits a belief in the reality of it”

(Desjardin 147). This single artifact has represented the Battle for millions of people and may be the most influential archive of memory about this conflict.

Shaara’s novel simplifies soldiers’ motivations, burnishes brutal violence, and reifies myths about the nation’s military history. The author makes the past into a vehicle for entertainment and avoids the intricate and debatable consequences of that past. When it is represented in sentimental, masculine, and honorific ways, focusing on the military action seems a safer arena for reflection.

The author’s use of detail from widely accepted historical records encourages readers to believe that they are getting a definitive lesson in the history of the Battle. Shaara reaffirms misinformation and myth in creative ways that celebrate bravery, sacrifice, and commitment to military duty. He combines nationalistic mythology and practiced literary style with ideological simplicity throughout. For these and other reasons, his version of the Battle seems nearly impervious to critique in the popular memory.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel, and although it is an acknowledged work of fiction, in the preface he expresses his goal to create a historically accurate version of events so that he, and readers, would “know what it was like to be there, what the weather was like, what the men’s faces looked like” (xiii). To convey realism and to plunge his reader into this version of the past, Shaara relies on modernistic literary devices such as stream of consciousness and multiple narrative perspectives. The historical details, the style of

writing and the intense focus on three days of the Battle may encourage many readers that this is “what the Battle must have been like.”

Like any writer of historical fiction, Shaara relies on historical records to describe actual events and contributes an artistic license to his rendering of such events. He uses the names of officers present at the Battle of Gettysburg and breaks the book into sections labeled for the dates upon which the Battle was fought. He includes maps that detail troop positions and include the names of particular locations: Hagerstown Road, the Seminary, Willoughby Run, and so on.

He also relies on historical accounts that name the famous sites within the Battlefield: The Devil’s Den, Cemetery Ridge, The Peach Orchard, Little Round Top, and others. Each chapter is separated into sections focused on officers present at the Battle: Lee, Longstreet, Chamberlain, Armistead and more. At times, Shaara writes from the different characters’ perspectives; at others, he writes from an omniscient narrator’s point of view, describing and detailing the events with his artistic license. However, the book reaffirms a certain notion of history—a version of reality that is more myth than recounting of the past. The ways in which battlefield violence is described is part of the ongoing tradition in popular descriptions of the Battle. Ironically, the intense focus on battlefield action is also characterized by a lack of attention to gore. Violent death is described throughout the novel in ways that allow sentimentality to thrive.

Early in the novel, Shaara describes the murder of Union General John Reynolds on the first day of battle. The General’s death is a matter of verifiable fact. No one, not even witnesses to the murder, could describe, exactly and consistently, this man’s death, but Shaara, as any writer must, makes choices in his description that are rhetorically significant. He writes, “Reynolds lay in the dirt road, the aides bending over him. When Buford got there the thick stain had already puddled the dirt beneath his head. His eyes were open, half asleep, his face pleasant and composed, a soft smile. Buford knelt. He was

dead. An aide, a young sergeant, was crying” (96). A mention of blood, a description of emotion related to loss; these may be realities of combat, but this description hardly shares the reality of battlefield violence.

Reynolds was most likely hit with the war’s most common rifled projectile—the Minie Ball. As one historian of military hardware conveys, this common battlefield “bullet” was “anything but mini” and was of an “extremely large .58 caliber, emerging from the barrel

of the weapon that fired it as a solid ounce of deformed, unstable, flesh-ripping, bone-shattering soft metal, big and heavy and slow” (Beidler 497). Beidler refers to “the meat problem” that writers encounter when describing war violence that would result from such

weaponry. He calls certain omissions a reaction to this problem of “the beef stew any soldier knows—the hamburger, the brains, the liver, and pancreas and intestines, the blood in buckets slopped all over the grass and other people” (500). Perhaps such graphic description would not fit into the popular memory of the Battle.

Shaara does occasionally describe violent consequences. However, these are rare

and the few instances make the overall lack of gore stand out in even greater relief. Shaara describes a moment on the second day of the Battle in which Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of Maine is the central character. Chamberlain is armed only with his revolver to withstand the inevitable Confederate charge when “A Reb came over a rock.

Bayonet fixed, black thin point forward and poised, face seemed

blinded, head twitched. Chamberlain aimed his pistol, fired, hit the

man dead center, down he went, folding; smoke swallowed him” (222). Is this realistic? No spattering of blood. No recoil of the weapon. No scream of pain. No writer can be faulted for not having included every possible detail of any scene, but consistent lack of detail suggests consistent obfuscation. Later he writes of “the newly dead, piles of red meat. One man down holding his stomach, blood pouring out of him like a butchered pig, young face, only a boy” (323). This singularly graphic description still does not approach

war’s bloody reality and is one of the very rare graphic descriptions of violence in the novel. Most often, the descriptions are catered to a rather childish audience. Still, The Killer Angels is praised for its verisimilitude.

The Fort-Wayne Journal Gazette reviewer writes, “Narrated a expertly as though Michael Shaara had been a participant in the Battle of Gettysburg” (Ballantine). Though intended as unequivocal praise, this comment has ironic connotations. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argues that veterans of World War I often conveyed their combat experiences in ways that would fit their audience’s desires; few audiences sought graphic descriptions of battlefield violence. Instead, highly figurative and vague language was

often used to describe the results of war. The same can be said of much writing about the Civil War. Colonel Chamberlain’s writing is quite representative of the norm in Civil War soldiers’ recollections.

In his 1913 Hearst Magazine reminiscence of a particular episode at Gettysburg, he writes:

"It was a stirring, not to say appalling sight: here a whole battery

of shot and shell cutting a ragged chasm through a serried mass, flinging men and horses like drift aside; there, a rifle volley at close range, with reeling shock, hands tossed in air, muskets dropped with death’s quick relax, or clutched with last, convulsive energy, men falling like grass before the scythe—other’s manhood’s proud calm and rally; there a little group kneeling above some favorite officer slain,—his intense spirit still animating the fiery steed pressing headlong with empty saddle to the van. "(25)

In Chamberlain’s account, the lack of graphic detail is nestled along-

side images taken from Arthurian legend. To imagine that an eyewitness account of battle is reliable must be, at least, called into question when analyzing the rhetoric employed within such a text. In Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory Carol Reardon asserts that personal memory of battlefield violence often reflects the desire for soldiers to “celebrate personal survival, or to find greater purpose, solace, or inspiration in what they had witnessed” as well as “preserving only those memories that held special meaning to them” (Reardon 2).

When cultural norms, desires to suppress painful memories, exhaustion, and the cacophony of battle are taken into account, how should an eyewitness account be expected to be an accurate representation of battle? Even with thousands of recollections and official reports of the Battle extant, objective clarity is impossible. More importantly, the

descriptions of battle often coincide with the desires of the society in

which such descriptions were constructed.

Shaara must rely on other people’s accounts of the past, no matter how much misinformation they may contain. Of course, many accounts of the Battle corroborate each other, but recorded memory comprises history; it does not convey the past. The records of the past are tinged by emotional and political motivation even when professionally trained historians gather the information. Though American historians like George Bancroft, Francis Parkman and John Lothrop Motley lived through the Civil War, they did not write about it from a scholarly perspective (Cullen 19). In fact, there was little academic writing about the war while it was occurring (Fahs 287–88). However, there was a tremendous amount of overtly commercial and political writing about the war as it occurred. This writing shaped

perception of the conflict and has influenced the version of the conflict that Shaara represents.

Immediately after the war, historians from both North and South did write about it. Most of these academic histories written before the twentieth century are distinctly biased and take “a moralistic stance that identified villains, isolated causes, or both. Unionists tended to

stress the evil of slavery, whereas former Confederates usually took a constitutional view defending their right to leave the Union” (Cullen 21). To assert their truths about the war, historians used military reports, eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, and magazine publications. As Fussell and Reardon assert, eyewitness accounts of war can-

not be depended upon for objectivity; sophisticated historical study of the war and of Gettysburg in particular did not emerge for many years after the war; journalists of each section of the nation slanted their writing for the benefit of patriotic sentiment. Thus, popular memory of the Battle emanates from suspect sources that gain legitimacy

through repetition and sophisticated rhetorical strategies.

Former tour guide for the National Park Service of Gettysburg, Thomas A. Desjardin, writes that the many popular versions of the Battle are “[b]ased on the deeply flawed memories of the participants and other eyewitnesses and then expanded through decades of social

and political debates, the story of Gettysburg has become a flexible, dynamic mythology, reflecting nearly anything Americans see as positive” (9). Shaara inherited many versions of the past and did not challenge pre-existing myths about Gettysburg. Instead, he imbued them with more life by exploring the fictional interiority of the icons engaged in the Battle. He also allowed the myths of Gettysburg to mean what his contemporary readers wanted to believe.

Shaara made military valor commendable and battlefield violence palatable to a public that may have been tired of war at the time of the novel’s publication in 1973. With United States’ involvement in Vietnam highly unpopular upon the book’s release, the nation may

not have been eager for a realistic and critical book about war. Instead, a war with easily defined enemies and soldiers in separate uniforms was needed. The novel also valorizes both Confederate and Union combatants and still represents the winners and losers in ideo-

logically satisfying—albeit simplistic—ways.

Desjardin writes that if Shaara had “gathered more clear facts at the start and then added a novelist’s license, the result would have been faulty enough” but Shaara uses easily available and popular historical sources. These sources and his artistic license meant that “the story he depicted was far more legend than history” (146). His flawed sources for the novel maintain a safe distance from the reality of battlefield suffering and murder. This version of combat exemplifies what Beidler calls the tendency to turn American history into another product for sale (489). The historical commodity, to be marketable,

is made attractive and Gettysburg products—including The Killer

Angels—are certainly attractive to a great many people.

The novel’s sanitized version of battle and the valorizing of United States and Confederate States’ soldiers makes the Battle into a palatable and commercially viable product. The way in which the war’s causes are presented also allows the commercialization of the

war and Battle to continue unimpeded. The intricacies and reasons

for fighting in the war are simplified. Shaara goes to great lengths

to put the most idealistic and anti-slavery sentiments into some of

his characters’ mouths. In a key moment in the novel, Union Colo-

nel Chamberlain gives a rousing speech to a group of his troops. He says:

"This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you’ll see

men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They

fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they

like killing. But we’re here for something new. I don’t ... this

hasn’t happened much in the history of the world. We’re an army

going out to set other men free." (30)

Were there men who believed they were fighting to set other men

free? Yes. Did the volunteer Chamberlain—professor of rhetoric and

religion—believe his argument as the primary reason to fight? This is possible especially since Chamberlain’s anti-slavery views are well-documented. But Shaara has taken a particular license in justification of the war. In fact, at a monument dedication ceremony at Gettysburg in 1889, the actual Chamberlain offered his own justification for the war. In Chamberlain’s 1889 dedication speech of the Maine Monument at Gettysburg, he said that the conflict was to address the:

"boastful pretense that each State held in its hand the death-warrant of the nation; that any State had a right, without show of justification outside its own caprice, to violate the covenants of the constitution, to break away from the Union and set up its own little

sovereignty as sufficient for all human purposes and ends; thus leaving it to mere will or whim of any member of our political system to destroy the body and dissolve the soul of the Great People." (192)

Chamberlain’s belief in the cause of the war seems to have little to do with “setting other men free” as Shaara’s version of the man says. In Shaara’s Vietnam-era sensibility, the desire to satisfy the audience with a simple and noble explanation for war’s justification is prioritized over adherence to what the actual Chamberlain may have believed. In his own words, Chamberlain’s argument for war is a defense of Union; for Shaara’s Chamberlain the cause is the eradication of slavery. This morally satisfying justification for war may be one reason the novel remains so popular. Because this best-selling novel was born in the morass of the Vietnam War, the author’s goals may have been to assuage the suffering of the nation by offering a version of war that could be explained in simple terms. He may also have used the Battle of Gettysburg as a stand-in for the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Kevin Grauke writes that, in the context of the Vietnam War and the Cold War, the novel can be read allegorically with the Confederacy representing oppressive communism: the Union

fights for the right to free people from the bondage of slavery, just as the Vietnam War was, ostensibly, an attempt for the United States “to free an innocent people from the bondage of communism” (Grauke 49). Throughout, Grauke argues that the only fully developed rationale for the Civil War in The Killer Angels is the idyllic Union cause that Chamberlain articulates. The soldiers on the Confederate side are never given such an opportunity to espouse their justification for fighting. The grandiloquent speeches are given to

Union officers and soldiers. The Confederate soldiers are consistently represented as tragic heroes who put their duty to the military above any other cause. Their fidelity to military duty and an abstract adherence to a belief in States’ rights are their motivation to kill and die in Shaara’s pleasing version.

By avoiding an explanation for the Southern cause and making the Union cause moral and simple, Shaara walks a tightrope to please a wide audience. This battle represents all that can be good about a militaristic nationalism: duty to country and commitment to a noble military cause. These virtues are unsullied by the disturbing complexities of the Civil War’s causes and consequences.

The novel’s Chamberlain thinks that in contrast to armies of other nations, “the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land” and that “This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here

and it would eventually spread all over the earth” (Shaara 27). Throughout the novel, Union soldiers are given the opportunity to espouse their beliefs in freedom, in justice, and in the moral superiority of their cause. This continues the novel’s ascent into crowd pleasing fantasy in Vietnam’s wake and such simple fantasies obscure the complex past. Colonel Chamberlain’s performance at Little Round Top is a crucial component in this legend.

Multiple reports and countless historical studies describe this famous encounter. In the late afternoon of July 2, 1863, the second day of the Battle, eight regiments of Union troops from Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan and Colonel Chamberlain’s Maine clashed with Confederate troops made up of two regiments from Texas and

three from Alabama, all commanded by Colonel William Oates. The small hill was heavily wooded but had a patch of land on its apex that was clear of trees. If the Confederates could occupy the small, steep hill—Little Round Top—they would make the Union Army’s

flank vulnerable. Whoever occupied the hill and the hill above it—Big Round Top—would be protected by the steep approach and could fire down on any assault. At the time Oates received his orders, the hill seemed unoccupied.

According to Shelby Foote, author of the monumental three volume The Civil War: A Narrative, the Confederates were repulsed twice as they tried to ascend the hill. Realizing they could not take the hill because the high ground was too well defended and they were

outnumbered, they started to withdraw from the assault (Foote 505). As they did, Chamberlain’s Union forces proceeded down the hill with a bayonet charge. This episode in The Killer Angels leaves out the detail that the Confederates may have already been retreating. Perhaps Shaara avoided this possible detail for good reason. He had

to make a choice, and the sense of triumph for readers may have been diminished if Chamberlain’s foe was already retreating. However, historians do not necessarily agree with this description of what happened that day. In McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: the

Civil War Era, he presents a different view of this event. Opposing

Foote, McPherson uses his sources to argue that the Confederate

troops were preparing for another assault up the hill against the Maine regiment that had run out of ammunition (659). Shaara eliminates the debate exemplified by Foote and McPherson’s different accounts. Instead, he makes the Confederates into a hard charging

force even though they faced daunting conditions including an uphill

assault, casualties from previous attempts, and exhaustion from all

day marching to the Battle site.

Rather than implying a Confederate retreat, Shaara focuses on the Union troops atop the hill before their bayonet charge is ordered. He has one of his Union soldier characters say to Chamberlain, “Colonel, they’re coming” (226). According to Shaara’s version of events, the Confederates were going to make one last charge up the hill, and any academic debate is put to rest about the Confederate plan of attack or retreat. This empowers the Confederate soldiers while also pointing out their disadvantages. Simultaneously, the Maine soldiers are out of ammunition and as doomed as their adversaries who are at a disadvantage. There are only two hundred Union troops left to defend the hill and, Chamberlain thinks, “More than that coming at us” (Shaara 226). The fight is fair in Shaara’s story and only a brave and wily Colonel from Maine had the courage to order a bayonet charge downhill.

This version—miraculously—makes both groups of soldiers the underdogs. As this scene evinces, the novel has winners and losers but no villains: it has only brave underdogs who represent martial bravery and American idealism regardless of their cause. Though the story of Chamberlain at Little Round Top is exemplary, the themes of heroism and insurmountable odds find their polestar in one of the most famous events of the Battle and, perhaps, of the entire war: the phenomenon that has come to be known as Pickett’s Charge. This charge has the elements of allegory needed for the ultimate Civil War story. McPherson observes “Pickett’s charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster” (662). Though this name—Pickett’s Charge—is a misnomer, many academic historians

like McPherson and novelists like Shaara rely upon it. Many other commanding officers were involved in the Confederate charge so there is no perfectly logical reason for Pickett’s name to be affixed.

On that early July afternoon—a day after the engagement at Little Round Top—a Confederate attack was carried out on the center of the Union forces assembled on Cemetery Ridge. Though this assault was ordered after a variety of misunderstood orders and changing circumstances, it was carried out by Longstreet’s Corps. Of that Corps, Pettigrew, Trimble, and Pickett’s divisions were to assault the Union center after barraging that position with artillery. Much of this is a matter of consistent historical record; but why is Pickett’s name associated with this event? Reardon argues that Pickett’s notoriety is the result of particular mass media forces and political motivations at work.

The way Pickett’s Charge has been popularly remembered demonstrates that popularity is often not a matter of happenstance. Rather, a variety of versions of the past are available, but some of them become dominant in popular culture. The economics of the print

industry and popular versions of this famous charge make apparent the power of print literacy to influence popular memory that is difficult to revise.

Though far less productive than their industrial counterparts in the North, the South still had a passionate literary culture during and after the war with the center of this industry in Richmond, Virginia. Pickett’s Division was made up of brigades consisting entirely of soldiers from Virginia. Combining the ability to publish with their geographically localized sympathies, Reardon argues that the local press made Pickett’s division into the focus of attention regardless of the other divisions involved. Furthermore, after the Bat-

tle of Gettysburg, the Northern papers valorized all the Confederate troops who took part but paid little attention to any particular State’s soldiers. Regardless of the facts, the Northern newspapers imbued the Confederate army with skills at least equal to the Union forces.

According to press accounts in the North and South now 2 years into the war at the time of the Battle, the two sides were near equally matched. The Northern press argued that the threat to the Union States was imminent and that the Battle of Gettysburg was a monumental and miraculous victory.

Northern papers consistently reported on the Confederacy’s skilled soldiers and the indefatigable General Lee. Of the final day of the Battle on which the charge took place, one Northern correspondent for New York World wrote, “[t]he Battles of Wednesday and yesterday were sufficiently terrible, but in that which has raged today the fighting done, not only by our troops, but those of Lee’s army, will rank in heroism, in perseverance, and in savage energy, with that of Waterloo” (qtd. in Reardon 42). The Union troops could not be celebrated as full of courage and valor if their enemy was not also represented this way. Additionally, correspondents had to inform and entertain “readers without confusing or repulsing them,” but they also had to file reports quickly which often led to pithiness and

hyperbole at the expense of accuracy (Reardon 39). Northern publications focused on a few singular officers while Southern writers delved deep into selective detail.

No other division in Lee’s army but Pickett’s was made up of soldiers exclusively from the state of Virginia (Reardon 34; Foote 531;Hess 406–07). All other divisions in the army were made up of soldiers from multiple states. This dispersion spread the suffering of loss widely across the South. However, the depth of loss was localized and focused on Virginia particularly on this last day of the Battle. This shared and localized mourning created an affinity for a certain version of the charge. Though many veterans and journalists did try to

correct the dominant version of the assault on the Union center afterwards and into the twentieth century, the popular versions have taken root. For example, in 1921 one North Carolina writer argued that “there is no reason why the [July 3] assault should have been

styled ‘Pickett’s Charge,’ except that the Richmond Papers were anxious to boost him for promotion to Lieutenant-General” (Clark qtd. in Reardon 210). Though some tried to correct the historical record—particularly North Carolinians who suffered great losses during the

assault—to argue which southern state suffered the most ran the risk of damaging the brittle bonds of Confederate nationalism.

Instead, Pickett’s Charge became and has remained a sign of Confederate bravery: “the more desperate and suicidal the image of the charge became, the greater the idea that Southern soldiers exhibited bravery, heroism, and commitment to their cause, qualities that they presumably held in ways far superior to the Yankees” (Desjardi124). Once books written about Pickett’s Charge became popular in the North and South, and encyclopedias accepted the dominant version, it was difficult to change (Reardon 173). As statues and other types of symbols memorialized the popular versions of the charge, the chances of altering the popular memory have become nearly impossible. Shaara adheres to the tradition of imbuing all soldiers with bravery and re-telling the popular version of the charge.

Shaara’s focus of the charge is Pickett, Armistead, Longstreet, and Chamberlain, and his dialogue adds to the myth of the glorious, brave, but ultimately tragic assault. General Longstreet delivers Lee’s orders to Pettigrew, Trimble, and Pickett saying, “Gentleman, the

fate of your country rests on this attack” (297). If this statement had proven true, the Confederate loss at Gettysburg and at this charge particularly would have hastened the end of the war; instead it would last two more years. But the charge’s importance in the novel and in popular memory is given grand justification. This is not just another

episode in a violent struggle: it is the preeminent symbol of bravery, valor, and beauty. Shaara’s version of Confederate officer Lewis Armistead looks at his fellow soldiers as they prepare to march toward the Union line and says, “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” and “They never looked better, on any parade ground” (321). The blood-

shed becomes a spectacle for the reader. Later in the novel, Shaara writes of Chamberlain’s reflection on the charge. The author shifts back and forth between omniscient narrator and character’s voice when he writes, “It was the most beautiful thing

he had ever seen. No book or music would have that beauty” and then speaks in the character’s voice “So this is tragedy. Yes,” and back and forth seamlessly, “He nodded. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising

across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question”

(342). This charge sanctifies the Confederate soldier and allows the Union soldier—and readers—to see the beauty of loyalty. This celebration of military duty continues a tradition in popular culture that encourages adherence to popular versions of the past where complexity is rendered unattractive. These versions make widespread critical reflection on the past ... elusive. Shaara’s story may be the definitive version for millions of people because—in contrast to many academic histories—his version is entertaining, assertive, idealistically satisfying, and marketed to the masses.

Desjardin, a battlefield guide for many years at Gettysburg, writes that “thousands of visitors to the Gettysburg battlefield made impassioned inquiries into the whereabouts of Buster’s grave in the Soldiers national Cemetery” and they are dismayed that his name is not included in the Maine Regiment’s list of dead (179): Buster Kilrain is a fictional character created for The Killer Angels. Kilrain is also a major character in the filmed version of the novel, Gettysburg. For many readers and filmgoers, he has become as real as Lee, Longstreet, and Chamberlain.

The Killer Angels, for many readers, has become an important history lesson. Complex explorations of the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg can still be found in many books; but books that encourage such reflection are seldom embraced by such large audiences as Shaara’s has been. This tradition of focusing on bloodless combat, military valor and sentimentality finds a champion in Shaara, but his work is not alone in this tradition; the tradition infected popular memory long before this novel’s publication, and it will continue to do so. I share Blight’s hopes for a widespread and meaningful reflection on the war, but I fear that the focus on military valor will continue to haunt popular memory and commemoration for many years to come. This focus will obscure the past but, more importantly, influence future choices regarding war, the United States and the promise of honor through violence.

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Nicholas White earned a PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English from the University of Arizona. In his doctoral dissertation entitled “Acceding to War: Nationalism, Popular Entertainment and the Battle of Gettysburg” he identifies recurrent arguments for martial nationalism in a popular novel, film, television documentary, and computer game that use the Battle of Gettysburg as their subject. His recent scholarly work has appeared in the journal Works and Days and the anthology The Computer Culture Reader.