It’s been a very busy, and for many of us rough, couple of weeks with seemingly no relief in sight. For those of us in the US we are all limping into the Independence Day 2022 weekend. In Canada, which celebrates Canada Day today, there was once again violence at the War Memorial in Ottawa. And, of course, the war to defend Ukraine against Putin’s re-invasion slowly grinds on along the lines of engagement in eastern and southern Ukraine, as well as everywhere that Putin’s long range fires can reach.
There are several posts that I have not done, most recently because I was fighting the sinus infection, but largely because each of the daily war updates takes between two and three hours and, on occasion, four or five hours between reading of sources, drafting, and revising. Since we have the long weekend, I’m going to do a couple of posts over the next few days that are not war updates, as well as updates that are. For tonight, I wanted to do something different: focus on the battle of Gettysburg.
Earlier today I saw that the US Army officer and military historian that tweets as Angry Staff Officer had begun a very long thread that he intends to update throughout the weekend walking the reader through the battle of Gettysburg. The battle, as we’ve covered here before, begins to the north and west of Gettysburg where MG Buford had deployed his two cavalry divisions and Calef’s battery. A deployment of forces intended to frustrate and bleed any confederate elements that would try to push into the town and one that was designed to maximize the terrain. As the battle begins, Buford’s troopers are deployed on the high ground and have at their back even more high ground that they can fall back to if necessary.
Let’s let the Angry Staff Officer take it from here:
US Brig. Gen. John Buford has two brigades of cavalry, which he has set up in a wide arc to the west and north of the small town of Gettysburg. He has placed groups of mounted troops – videttes – at critical points along the roads to act as an early warning system.
— Angry Staff Officer (@pptsapper) July 1, 2022
Within twenty miles of Gettysburg, upwards of 160,000 soldiers are engaged in the mundane acts of soldier life: guard duty, work details, and trying to catch some sleep. The civilian population is also – rightfully – nervous. It will be a long night for many around Gettysburg.
— Angry Staff Officer (@pptsapper) July 1, 2022
It's just after 7 AM on July 1, 1863. Morning mist still hangs in some low spaces. Dew glistens on the blades of grass and makes the gossamer spider webs shimmer. Some Illinois troopers on the Chambersburg Pike finally spot movement: lead elements of Heth's Division on the move
— Angry Staff Officer (@pptsapper) July 1, 2022
Much, much, much more at the link.
While the Angry Staff Officer expressed that he was not sure why LTG Reynolds decided to force a fight at Gettysburg, I have a theory. Reynolds was from southern Pennsylvania. He grew up in the region that includes Gettysburg and he knew the terrain. As a result he recognized that the terrain could be decisive to a successful outcome. Unfortunately, after bringing up I and XII Corps and briefly meeting with MG Buford he was shot while astride his horse and die soon after.
I’ll be back tomorrow night with an actual war update.
And because I’m not completely heartless, your daily Patron!
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🐕We made this video in order to pay tribute to dogs like Patron, which help us demining territories and save thousands of lives🇺🇦!
Share this video and follow us, we will get more of them #istandwithukraine pic.twitter.com/jzqe2Uu2sV— Rubryka – Solutions from Ukraine (@RubrykaEng) June 29, 2022
And even more video from Patron’s official TikTok!
@patron__dsns Ділюся з вами своїм секретиком!😌 #песпатрон #патрондснс #славаукраїні
The caption translates as:
I share with you my secret! #pespatron #patrondsns #slavaukraini
That secret is, apparently, ice cream!!!!
Open thread!
The Jan.6 Committee Hearing: Some Repubs Who Deserve More Time in the 
Gin & Tonic
Patron recommends that everyone eat ice cream. Good advice, if you ask me.
Gin & Tonic
Posted this downstairs. Dude doesn’t even put out his smoke. Respect.
Priest
The Gettysburg details take me back to adolescence, when I played the Avalon Hill table game. All those board pieces (“counters” I believe is the correct term) with the unit commanders’ names.
Priest
Game starts with Devin and Gamble Union cavalry units near Gettysburg, with Heth’s infantry down Chambersburg Pike.
James E Powell
I’m gonna celebrate this weekend by watching that big four hour long Gettysburg. I’ve been there five times and I like that I can tell exactly where they are standing and shout at the dogs, “I stood right there!” They are very understanding of my enthusiasms.
opiejeanne
Thanks for posting that link to the Gettysburg thread. Visiting Gettysburg was a surprisingly moving experience for me. We took my dad and paid a historian to drive us around the area, and we gave him a 100% tip because it was an amazing day. I also spent some time in the cemetery, listening to the guide leading the walking tour and learned a lot about that place, and why it was special. A public cemetery that wasn’t limited to a single religion or any religion, a new concept.
Andrya
Adam, since you have branched out, I would be very interested in more posts about the US Civil War. (I would be particularly interested in posts about US Grant, whom I think has been massively underestimated both as a general and a president.) There’s no reason you should gratify my wishes, but it doesn’t hurt to ask….
Also, I’d love to have one of those Patron t-shirts, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them. (This is not pure self-indulgence: wearing “Slava Ukraini” t-shirts causes people to ask me about it, which gives me a chance to do pro-Ukraine propaganda.)
Another Scott
@Andrya: If you haven’t seen it, TNC wrote a lot about Grant while he was reading his autobiography when he was at TheAtlantic. There was lots of good discussion there too.
A taste – These are the last days of US Grant.
HTH.
Thanks, Adam. I have only been to Gettysburg once and was too young to understand the significance.
Huge numbers of men died to keep the country together. We need to remember that.
Cheers,
Scott.
dnfree
@Another Scott: I miss the days when Ta-Nehisi Coates had time to write that blog and monitor the comments. I learned a lot.
Mike in NC
Visited Gettysburg several times when we lived fairly close by in NoVA. A great visitor center/museum and several cool art galleries and gift shops in the town.
Made the mistake one time of watching the movie on cable where they padded it with so many stupid commercials that it ran about six hours with no new footage. What an utter waste of time.
We also had friends who lived in Fredericksburg and we always loved going down there.
Andrya
@Another Scott: Thanks! I had read TNC on Grant, but it’s good to be reminded to re-read, which I will do. I have also read Grant’s memoirs- I have always thought that the fact that he was a great writer and a great general were linked- a great general writes really clear orders. (My understanding is that the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 resulted from unclear orders.)
Your recommendations are great, but I would still love to have Adam’s take on any and all Civil War topics. (Again, Adam, there is no reason that you should gratify me, but it doesn’t hurt to ask… )
opiejeanne
@Andrya: I am pretty sure Mark Twain wrote Grant’s memoirs.
Mike in NC
Very best Civil War battlefield tour we ever did was at Antietam, because the National Park rangers did a fantastic presentation of the events that happened there.
Andrya
@opiejeanne: On what basis? Mark Twain definitely facilitated Grant’s memoirs, but there is a mass of military/technical detail in the memoirs that it would be very unlikely that Mark Twain (who did not serve in the Civil War, much less as a general officer) would know. What is the basis for your assertion?
Geoduck
Ward Moore’s alternate-history novel Bring The Jubilee (one of the first of the genre) features Gettysburg as a major plot point.
opiejeanne
@Andrya: I guess I fell for the story/rumors started by Badeau who helped Grant write them.
jimbales
@Another Scott: Thanks for the link — I read TNC obsessively when he was posting at the Atlantic, and it is good to go back and re-read this!
Best
Jim
Adam L. Silverman
@Andrya: Let me get through the current ongoing war first.
I highly recommend Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War.
jimbales
@Andrya: I recall Shelby Foote commenting on the clarity of Grant’s written orders. As I recall, he also relayed descriptions of Grant getting up from his desk while writing orders to cross the room to get a document and return to his desk, walking the whole way hunched over in the same position his body was as he wrote!
Best
Jim
Adam L. Silverman
@jimbales: Foote was both a neo-confederate and a deserter from his own service Roth the US military.
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L. Silverman: he was an asshole. But his son is a nice guy and a talented photographer.
Andrya
Adam, of course. I knew I was pushing the boundaries. If, after the Ukrainian victory (please God!) you want to post about the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War, or the War of 1812, or WW1, or WW2, or the Korean War, or the Vietnam War, I will follow your posts avidly.
Adam L. Silverman
@Andrya: Milagros bean field war.
Geminid
@Andrya: I think W.F.C. Fuller’s The Generalship of Ulysses Grant (1926?) is one of the best biographies of the man. Fuller intended the book to tell the story of the Civil War through Grant’s career, and he did a good job. He was a successful and well known writer on miltary strategy and history and could afford research assistants to do a lot of digging through records. Fuller was an excellent writer and the book is a good read.
This is the only Grant biography I’ve read that doesn’t spend at least a couple pages wrestling the question of Grant’s drinking habits. In fact, there is not one sentence about Grant and alcohol, although Fuller surely knew the stories. Instead, Fuller dedicated the book to the Youth of America, in hopes they would profit from the example of Grant’s moral character.
Fuller was a retired senior British Army staff officer, and it could be that he considered Grant’s use of alcohol to be entirely normal for an army officer of his time. Which it was.
Adam L. Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: Ok. Shoot me an email when you get a chance. Please.
Chetan Murthy
@dnfree: Whenever I think about Ta-Nehisi Coates, I remember this article:
The Hyperlinked Ballad Of Eliza Icewalker
https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/10/the-hyperlinked-ballad-of-eliza-icewalker/263663/
He’s written many other excellent articles, that are responsible for my finally becoming “woke”. But this one …. this one ….
Prestor John
@Adam L. Silverman:
If memory serves (not a sure thing) a number of years ago you introduced a series on the day by day events of Gettysburg. My recollection is that it was written by an Army Captain Bateman. It was a captivating series as the blog spread the events over four days, the duration of the battle. (As I recall Bateman was unsparing in his criticism of Lee. No romantic or heroic figure for him. He considered Lee a violator of his oath of service and a traitor to his country.)
Do you know if those articles are available somewhere in the bowels of the blog? On the inter tubes? As I said, I found the series fascinating and am sure others with an interest in the Civil War would also.
NotMax
Don’t you know that whole Gettysburg thing was a false flag operation perpetrated by the Hardtack and Salt Pork cartels?
//
jnfr
I love Patron.
Adam L. Silverman
@Prestor John: Lieutenant Colonel now retired Bateman. I’ll dig the links out tomorrow and post them. Bob is good people.
NotMax
OT.
And so it begins. First fireworks boomlet just now heard from outside.
::sigh::
Adam L. Silverman
@jnfr: That’s just SCIENCE!
James E Powell
@Adam L. Silverman:
Lt Colonel Bateman! A name from the early days of blogs; from the time of the Bush/Cheney Junta. Very smart, very good at explaining things.
Prestor John
@Adam L. Silverman:
Many thank. I look forward to reading it again.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Adam, thanks for the post. What do you think of The Killer Angels?
I have been dreaming of taking a tour of the Army of the Potomac Civil War battlefields since I have never seen any of them except for Shiloh. I saw Shiloh 20 or 25 years ago and it was an amazing (and amazingly moving) experience. Things may have changed, but when I drove there from Memphis, it was still way out in the country as it had been at the time of the battle. All the state memorial monuments just about broke my heart.
Geminid
I think one big question about the encounter between Buford’s cavalry and Heth’s infantry is, why was Heth’s division marching down that road in the first place? Lee intended to fight a major battle in Pennsylvania, but he did not want to begin it before all his army was at hand. It’s true that the Confederates “won” the first day at Gettysburg, but several of its brigades were wrecked and the army ended up in an awkward position that hampered it the next two days.
Lee and his generals made many bad mistakes in that battle. Heth’s immediate commander, A.P. Hill made one of the worst when he allowed Heth to go hunt trouble in Gettysburg that day
Adam L. Silverman
@Geminid: Heth thought he’d encountered local militia and that he could roll them up pretty easily. And once they were gone he’d be able to raid the town for supplies without any resistance. He didn’t know he was facing two brigades under command of Buford. And that was because Stuart was of on his sweep and not where he should’ve been: scouting ahead of Lee’s army.
As to the confederates having won the first day, I would not characterize things that way.
Adam L. Silverman
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I think the Killer Angels is an enjoyable book, it provides a good flavor of what was taking place, especially the organizational cultural problems within Lee’s command. But you can’t rely on it as history.
Geminid
@Adam L. Silverman: I put “won” in quotation marks because I don’t think routing the U.S . 1st and 11th Corps and capturing the town of Gettysburg outweighed the heavy damage the 1st Corps inflicted upon Confederate units like Archer’s, Davis’s, and Iverson’s brigades. Gettysburg itself was somewhat of a white elephant, a place that was very difficult to stage an attack out of.
At one point Lee directed Ewell to bring his corps out of Gettysburg and the area north of the town and place it in the Seminary Ridge area where it would have more offensive potential. Ewell balked, saying that giving up the ground gained on July 1 would be a blow to his men’s morale, which I think was a pretty sorry excuse. Here, Lee may have suffered from having such a barebones staff, and his practice of giving his corps commanders latitude. He left Ewell’s troops in front of the Union’s strongest defensive terrain, where they did little good.
Heth’s ostensible reason to march to Gettysburg was to hunt up shoes. I think, though, that newly-minted corps commander A.P. Hill wanted to win a cheap victory over the Pennsylvania Home Guard. Instead of gathering laurels, Hill managed to gather the whole Yankee army in a superb defensive position.
lowtechcyclist
@Adam L. Silverman:
And even more his three-volume history of the Army of the Potomac.
lowtechcyclist
Angry Staff Officer:
I know, ‘the unforgiving June sun’ doesn’t’ have quite the same ring to it, but July hasn’t begun yet in this account. Fixed that for him.
lowtechcyclist
@Adam L. Silverman:
I think the Killer Angels is an enjoyable book, it provides a good flavor of what was taking place, especially the organizational cultural problems within Lee’s command. But you can’t rely on it as history.
It’s mostly pretty accurate AFAICT, though Buster Kilrain is a fictional addition – Shaara’s ‘Mary Sue’ if you will. The big issue I have with it is his implication that once the 20th Maine charged and routed the Rebs in front of it, that turned the tide of the battle.
Catton’s good here: after describing the 20th Maine’s heroics, he writes: “Yet if that wildly improbable counterattack had saved the army’s flank, it had saved it only for the moment. This was a day on which crisis followed crisis.” And then goes on to describe another four or five instances where the Confederates came within an ace of breaking the Union line that long afternoon and evening. It was hard to put down Catton’s account of the battle in Glory Road long enough for me to write this.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: My gripe with Shaara and his book is that in order to build up his heros Hancock and Chamberlain, he diminishes other Union commanders. Meade and others seem like dull stock characters whose mediocrity gives Hancock and Chamberlain their chance to shine.
Shaara’s son did the same thing to Grant in one of the sequels, which rubbed this Grant fan the wrong way. I know that Grant certainly was not a perfect military commander; right now I’m reading Ernest B. Furgurson’s book on the Cold Harbor battle, the low point of Grant’s Overland Campaign. Still, there was a lot more to Grant than the two-dimensional stereotype the younger Shaara depicted.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
My take on Jeff Shaara is that he’s a competent but hardly inspired writer who’s figured out how to turn his father’s one blaze of glory into a franchise. I read a couple of his Civil War books and I literally found them forgettable – I can’t remember a damn thing from any of his books that I read. At least for me, he’s not worth caring about.
Omnes Omnibus
I am one of those that ASO to told to mute him for the weekend. Vicksburg was the more important victory.
Ksmiami
@Another Scott: and a lot of stupid men died trying to tear it apart
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: I think Gettysburg’s most consequential impact was its effect on Northern morale. This victory stood out against a dreary background of eastern battles where the Union army was thrashed, or had dubious results.
Other regions were strategically important but the eastern theatre always loomed largest in public perceptions. That is one reason Grant decided to stay with the Army of the Potomac after he was made commander-in-chief.
Lincoln had to win reelection in 1864 if the South’s rebellion was to be put down. The Confederacy’s survival hinged on Northern war weariness. Lee knew that once his army was pinned against Petersburg military defeat was only a matter of time, but this was not so obvious to Northern civilians. Union victories at Atlanta, Mobile, and Cedar Creek boosted Northern spirits, but the victory at Gettysburg the year before remained a cornerstone of Northern morale, I believe.
Grant’s Vicksburg campaign was clearly the more significant in military terms, but Gettysburg may have been as important in the political sphere.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Prestor John:
He wrote at Esquire. Robert Bateman – The Meaning of Oaths and a Forgotten Man (from 2013):
Cheers,
Scott.