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.”

The 96th Pennsylvania Volunteers infantry regiment was formed in 1861--its ranks filled by nearly 1,200 Irish and German immigrants from Schuylkill County responding to Lincoln's call for troops. The men saw action for three years with the Army of the Potomac's VI Corps, participating in engagements at Gaines' Mill, Crampton's Gap, Salem Church and Spotsylvania. Drawing on letters, diaries, memoirs and other accounts, this comprehensive history documents their combat service from the point of view of the rank-and-file soldier, along with their views on the war, slavery, emancipation and politics.

This is the first book-length, critical analysis of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's actions at the Battle of Gettysburg. The author argues that Longstreet's record has been discredited unfairly, beginning with character assassination by his contemporaries after the war and, persistently, by historians in the decades since. By closely studying the three-day battle, and conducting an incisive historiographical inquiry into Longstreet's treatment by scholars, this book presents an alternative view of Longstreet as an effective military leader, and refutes over a century of negative evaluations of his performance.

A comprehensive, deeply researched history of the pivotal 1863 American Civil War battle fought in northern Virginia. June 1863. The Gettysburg Campaign is underway. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia pushes west into the Shenandoah Valley and then north toward the Potomac River. Only one significant force stands in its way: Maj. Gen. Robert H. Milroy’s Union division of the Eighth Army Corps in the vicinity of Winchester and Berryville, Virginia. What happens next is the subject of this provocative new book. Milroy, a veteran Indiana politician-turned-soldier, was convinced the approaching enemy consisted of nothing more than cavalry or was merely a feint, and so defied repeated instructions to withdraw. In fact, the enemy consisted of General Lee’s veteran Second Corps under Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell. Milroy’s controversial decision committed his outnumbered and largely inexperienced men against some of Lee’s finest veterans. The complex and fascinating maneuvering and fighting on June 13-15 cost Milroy hundreds of killed and wounded and about 4,000 captured (roughly one-half of his command), with the remainder routed from the battlefield. The combat cleared the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley of Federal troops, demonstrated Lee could obtain supplies on the march, justified the elevation of General Ewell to replace the recently deceased Stonewall Jackson, and sent shockwaves through the Northern states. Today, the Second Battle of Winchester is largely forgotten. But in June 1863, the politically charged front-page news caught President Lincoln and the War Department by surprise and forever tarnished Milroy’s career. The beleaguered Federal soldiers who fought there spent a lifetime seeking redemption, arguing their three-day “forlorn hope” delayed the Rebels long enough to allow the Army of the Potomac to arrive and defeat Lee at Gettysburg. For the Confederates, the decisive leadership on display outside Winchester masked significant command issues buried within the upper echelons of Jackson’s former corps that would become painfully evident during the early days of July on a different battlefield in Pennsylvania. Award-winning authors Eric J. Wittenberg and Scott L. Mingus Sr. combined their researching and writing talents to produce the most in-depth and comprehensive study of Second Winchester ever written, and now in paperback. Their balanced effort, based upon scores of archival and previously unpublished diaries, newspaper accounts, and letter collections, coupled with familiarity with the terrain around Winchester and across the lower Shenandoah Valley, explores the battle from every perspective.

A collection of frightening stories, including the Civil War ghosts of Gettysburg, spirits at John Brown's tannery, the fiddling ghost of Potter County, hauntings at the Eastern State Penitentiary, the mysterious indelible handprint, and many more.

“A clear and concise telling” of America’s most famous battle. “[Hoptak] has crafted a narrative that is similar to a well led tour of the battlefield” (Civil War Librarian). Fought on the first three days of July 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg was one of the largest and by far the bloodiest of the Civil War. Yet the importance of this great conflagration cannot be measured in numbers alone, for Gettysburg also represented a pivotal moment in the war. The battle ended General Robert E. Lee’s second invasion of Union soil, and never again did a Confederate army reach that far north. Join historian John Hoptak as he narrates the fierce action between the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac at such places as McPherson’s Ridge, the Railroad Cut, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, Little Round Top and on Culp’s and Cemetery Hills. “His expertise comes through loud and clear in his energetic prose, combining narrative and analysis in a book that enlightens novices without boring more experienced readers.” —Historynet.com