[On November 19, 1863
President Abraham Lincoln delivered the
Gettsysburg Address. Few American speeches have been more significant, so
this week I’ll AmericanStudy the address and a few other Gettysburg histories
and contexts. Leading up to a special Thanksgiving weekend post!]
On the
distinctions between military and cultural history, and their interconnections.
As I understand
it—and as a youthful Civil War buff AmericanStudier-in-training I read quite a
bit into the war’s battles and strategies, most especially in Bruce Catton’s
magisterial American
Heritage Picture History—military historians
have consistently tended to argue that General James Longstreet, Robert E.
Lee’s chief subordinate and dependable “old
war horse,” made a number of significant tactical mistakes during the
battle of Gettysburg, particularly on the second day (Longstreet naturally
disagreed). Moreover, at least some of those mistakes were of the
disobedient variety: failing to follow particular orders, attemping his own maneuvers
instead of those ordered by Lee, not readying his troops when ordered to do so,
etc. Historian
Henry Pfanz argues, “Longstreet's angry dissidence had resulted in further
wasted time and delay,” and David Callihan adds, “It is appalling that a field
commander of Longstreet's experience and caliber would so cavalierly and
ineptly march and prepare his men for battle.” Overall, Edwin
Coddington sums up this line of thinking, the battle was “a dark moment in
Longstreet's career as a general.”
I don’t doubt
that these military historians have the right of it in many ways, but I’ll
admit that the narrative is a frustrating one for me, for the reasons detailed in
this post (and expanded upon for the rest of this paragraph). As I wrote
there, young AmericanStudier worshipped Robert E. Lee the military tactician
and leader, and was concurrently frustrated at the thought that a lesser
commander like Longstreet thwarted some of Lee’s best-laid plans in a crucial
battle like Gettysburg. Then I grew up, and realized a) thank goodness the
Confederacy didn’t win at Gettysburg (as I argued in yesterday’s Chamberlain
post); and b) whatever their respective tactical qualities, Longstreet was a
considerably better man than Lee, probably throughout
their lives and certainly during the crucial
post-war years. And just as I can’t separate those cultural historical
issues and frames from how I now respond to the battle and its controversial
decisions, neither can the Lost
Cause acolytes and neo-Confederate partisans whose post-war hostility
toward Longstreet has without question contributed to the ongoing narratives of
him as a disgruntled Lee subordinate.
Moreover, if we
try to remove those cultural histories from the equation, I believe that
Longstreet’s disobedience at Gettysburg looks significantly different. That’s
unquestionably true of his opposition to Lee’s final-day plan to charge the
Union center directly; as Longstreet would later recall his words to Lee in
his memoir, “General, I have been a soldier all my life. … It is my opinion
that no fifteen thousand men ever arranged for battle can take that position.” Lee
ordered the attack nonetheless, Longstreet was right, and Pickett’s
Charge would become one of the war’s most disastrous and destructive
failures. And if we start there, perhaps Longstreet’s other disagreements with
Lee during the battle might look more understandable and even accurate as well.
After all, military history is still a history of humans, of personalities and
perspectives, both the ones we bring from our own era and the ones we find in
the historical figures and moments. Longstreet was always a bit of an
iconoclast—and if that clearly put him on the right side of history after the
war, perhaps it also did so at Gettysburg more than our typical narratives of
the battle have allowed.
Next Gettysburg
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
No comments:
Post a Comment