Critic's Corner

Restoring an Old Painting

By Stephen Davis · Originally published July 2016 · p. 20

Editor’s Question: What’s your favorite “Gettysburg book”? CWN contributor Steve Davis invites your responses and comments at [email protected].

In 2002, when Noah Andre Trudeau’s Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage came out, HarperCollins arranged a signing tour. I was slated to review the book for a journal, so I got to meet the author when he was in Atlanta. We talked about how the literature of the battle has broken it into so many pieces: a day, a charge, a flank, a railroad cut. With so much microhistory on Gettysburg, I asked him, what did he think he could contribute with his book. Andy answered that he thought of his study as something like “restoring an old painting.” I’ve liked that answer ever since, for it suggests what a good historian should strive to do: take a well-known subject and strip away the daubs and accretions added by subsequent renderers, trying to get at the original picture. Trudeau’s analogy shouldn’t be taken too far, though, because military history is not an old painting. Much of what we know and accept today about Gettysburg is the composite result of any number of writers, beginning with the participants themselves. Despite such a vast literature, in A Testing of Courage Trudeau has managed to render some distinctive flourishes of his own. Take, for instance, the very breakout of the battle. A.P. Hill told his division commander Harry Heth that he was to march on Gettysburg, with Pender’s division behind. Yet Hill told Heth, “Do not bring on an engagement.” Hill was giving “mixed signals” to a division commander who had been in that position for just five weeks. “Managing the fine balance between aggressively executing the assignment and avoiding a fullblown encounter would have taxed the judgment of the most experienced combat officer,” Trudeau astutely judges, “and Henry Heth was not at that level.” Then there is “Hood’s Digression.” As Gettysburghers know, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s order for July 2 called for an attack up the Emmitsburg Road. But after Maj. Gen. John B. Hood’s division approached its position, Hood saw that the enemy could be turned by a further advance to the right. This would throw his division against Little Round Top, which scouts reported was not held by Yankee troops. Three times did Hood send messages to Longstreet, asking permission to change the attack plan. Three times was he refused; Pete ordered him to launch his attack. “Very well,” Trudeau quotes Hood as telling Maj. Harry Sellers, “When we get under fire I will have a digression.” The digression would have delivered the flank attack Hood had requested from Longstreet. As we know, however, Hood was taken out of the battle with a shrapnel wound to his arm before he could execute his plan. To be sure, Harry Pfanz, in his monumental Gettysburg: The Second Day (1987), discusses Hood’s flanking maneuver (and judges it would have taken too much time that afternoon). But Pfanz does not quote Hood’s statement to Sellers, nor mention that Lt. Col. Phillip A. Work, commander of the 1st Texas, later wrote that five other Texans besides himself heard Hood’s promise of a “digression.” Trudeau thus not only makes more mention of the “digression,” but he even has a map drawn to illustrate what Hood’s attack against Little Round Top would have looked like. A bold artist — er, historian, should not be afraid to advance an argument. Most of us know that for his charge against the Union center on the third day, Lee planned to advance nine brigades, some 11,800 men. Trudeau asserts that, in addition, Lee planned to use another 11 brigades as a supporting wave. “Seemingly lost amid the decades of dialogue about the event,” he writes, “was the fact that Lee’s planning had provided for a second assault group nearly as strong as the first.” The idea is apparently not new. Richard Rollins, I learn, has written about the “second wave” in Gettysburg Magazine (January 1998). Jeffry Wert discusses the subject in his Gettysburg: Day Three (2001). But it was Trudeau — quoting Richard Anderson and

William Allan, even naming the 11 “second wave” brigades — who opened my eyes to this tantalizing scenario. You don’t forget this kind of awakening. Back in 2002 I was a bachelor. I remember reading in A Testing of Courage that after Chancellorsville, bars in Washington and New York served up a beverage called “Hooker’s Retreat.” When I went to my favorite bar I started ordering one, too. Wendy, the bartender, obliged. I never knew what she poured into each drink, but it was always good, and different every time. Years later, the bar is gone, and so is the bartender. But Trudeau’s Gettysburg is still around, as durable as some old masterpiece. Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News. His new book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, has just been published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series. The companion volume, carrying the Atlanta Campaign to the city’s surrender on September 2, 1864, will be published later this summer.