The Stand Of The U S Army At Gettysburg

"This is not just 'another Gettysburg book,' but a different Gettysburg book. Most of the prior Gettysburg books have been accounts of Confederate command failures that led to Confederate defeat. This is the story of the Federal defense leading to Federal victory. The book contains new material and new insights. It rivals Coddington as an essential Gettysburg book, and it maps the battle like Bigelow mapped The Campaign at Chancellorsville." -- Alan T. Nolan, author of Lee Considered and The Iron Brigade This major reinterpretation of the key battle of the American Civil War tells the story of the Gettysburg campaign as it unfolded from early June through mid-July 1863, and its climax with the Federal victory at Gettysburg. The book strives to describe the campaign with utmost clarity. In pursuit of this goal, it restricts itself to the campaign's major events and participants. Yet many components of even a boiled-down account of the campaign are complex. Accordingly, The Stand features more than 160 maps and numerous diagrams that allow the reader to understand what happened at every important stage of the campaign, with special emphasis on the three-day battle of July 1--3. The book also pays tribute to the vast literature on Gettysburg, with careful consideration of the many analyses of the campaign, paying particular attention to recent works. The appearance of new interpretations, including those offered here, suggests that only now, nearly 150 years after the event, are we approaching a complete and accurate view of what happened during those crucial days at Gettysburg.

Contains more than 20 maps, diagrams and illustrations Although "Fighting Joe" Hooker skillfully executes a well-conceived plan and out-flanks his adversary, months of offensive planning are shelved as he suddenly orders his army on the defensive. Lee seizes the initiative and achieves what has often been called his most brilliant victory. How could this happen when Hooker's army outnumbers that of Lee 2 to 1 and is far superior in artillery and logistics? Answers to these and other questions concerning leadership, communications, use of terrain, and the psychology of men in battle, are often found by personal reconnaissance of the battlefield. This book offers a staff ride briefing of Chancellorsville. Since 1906 staff rides have been used to in the education of U.S. Army officers to narrow the gap between peacetime training and war.

Members of today's 111th Infantry, a regiment in the Pennsylvania National Guard, feel a strong sense of pride and comradeship with the members of the Philadelphia Brigade, the first citizen militia unit to exist in Pennsylvania, derived from the Associators found in 1747 in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin. The Philadelphia Brigade joined Washington's Army for the Trenton-Princeton Campaign during the American Revolution. By the Civil War, the Associators had become the 72nd Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, which served along with three other regiments from Philadelphia in a brigade commanded by General Alexander Webb. Webb's brigade was actively engaged in battle with Confederate units assaulting Cemetery Ridge on July 2 and 3, 1863, during the Battle of Gettysburg. Brought together at this momentous battle these men developed a sense of pride and brotherhood that extended far beyond their own regiment to include comrades and former foes alike. In 1921 the Associators became the present-day 111th Infantry.

Discusses how to plan a staff ride of a battlefield, such as a Civil War battlefield, as part of military training. This brochure demonstrates how a staff ride can be made available to military leaders throughout the Army, not just those in the formal education system.

“[A] stirring narrative of the common soldier’s experiences on the southern end of the battlefield on the second day of fighting at Gettysburg.” —Civil War News “Stand to It and Give Them Hell” chronicles the Gettysburg fighting from Cemetery Ridge to Little Round Top on July 2, 1863, through the letters, memoirs, diaries, and postwar recollections of the men from both armies who struggled to control that “hallowed ground.” John Michael Priest, dubbed the “Ernie Pyle” of the Civil War soldier by legendary historian Edwin C. Bearss, wrote this book to help readers understand and experience, as closely as possible through the written word, the stress and terror of that fateful day in Pennsylvania. Nearly sixty detailed maps, mostly on the regimental level, illustrate the tremendous troop congestion in the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, and Devil’s Den. They accurately establish, by regiment or company, the extent of the Federal skirmish line from Ziegler’s Grove to the Slyder farm and portray the final Confederate push against the Codori farm and the center of Cemetery Ridge, which three Confederate divisions—in what is popularly known as Pickett’s Charge—would unsuccessfully attack on the final day of fighting. “‘Stand to It and Give Them Hell’ puts a human face on the second day of the nation’s epic Civil War battle . . . Mike Priest has taken a familiar story and somehow made it fresh and new. It is simply first-rate.” —Lance J. Herdegen, award-winning author of Union Soldiers in the American Civil War “Remarkable . . . Priest’s distinctive style is rife with anecdotes, many drawn from obscure diaries and letters, artfully stitched together in an original manner.” —David G. Martin, author of The Shiloh Campaign

The Address was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg. In just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, and that would also create a unified nation in which states' rights were no longer dominant. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

The Campaign and Battle of Gettysburg have inspired scrutiny from virtually every angle. Standing out amid the voluminous scholarship, this book is not merely one more narrative history of the events that transpired before, during, and after those three momentous July days in southern Pennsylvania. Rather, it focuses on and analyzes nineteen critical decisions by Union and Confederate commanders that determined the particular ways in which those events unfolded. Matt Spruill, a retired U.S. Army colonel who studied and taught at the U. S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, contends that, among the many decisions made during any military campaign, a limited number—strategic, operational, tactical, organizational—make the difference, with subsequent decisions and circumstances proceeding from those defining moments. At Gettysburg, he contends, had any of the nineteen decisions he identifies not been made and/or another decision made in its stead, all sorts of events from those decision points on would have been different and the campaign and battle as we know it today would appear differently. The battle might have lasted two days or four days instead of three. The orientation of opposing forces might have been different. The battle could well have occurred away from Gettysburg rather than around the town. Whether Lee would have emerged the victor and Meade the vanquished remains an open question, but whatever the outcome, it was the particular decision-making delineated here that shaped the campaign that went into the history books. Along with his insightful analysis of the nineteen decisions, Spruill includes a valuable appendix that takes the battlefield visitor to the actual locations where the decisions were made or executed. This guide features excerpts from primary documents that further illuminate the ways in which the commanders saw situations on the ground and made their decisions accordingly.

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.