A Field Guide to Gettysburg:

Experiencing the Battlefield through
its History, Places, and People

Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler

University of North Carolina Press, 2013, 438 pp., $22.00

Review by Gordon Berg

Twenty-first century battlefield explorers have audio tours, computer apps, and GPS devices to help direct their wanderings.  Would anyone be so old school as to carry a book to guide them?  If they had Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler's comprehensive, easy-to-read, field guide to Gettysburg, they would.  Reardon is a renowned Civil War scholar and author.  Vossler is a combat veteran, a former director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, and a licensed battlefield guide.

Both authors live in Gettysburg and their easy familiarity with the terrain, the historical facts of the battle, and eye-opening local anecdotes make the guide a valuable companion for first-time visitors, veteran battlefield trampers, as well as armchair explorers.  Photographs and informative maps add a contemporary feel to the historic geography of the Civil War's most hallowed grounds.

Built around six critical questions, each of the 35 stops throughout the park's 6,000 acres offers “a detailed account of a specific element of the three-day engagement.”  From the National Park Service's new and improved visitor's center to The Soldier's National Cemetery, the visitor/reader  is told what happened there, who fought there, who commanded there, who fell there, who lived there, and what was said later about what took place there.  Answering the same questions at each location helps the reader grasp how the multitude of individual actions fit together and contributed to the outcome of the battle.  Along the way, marginal events gain prominence, accepted facts gain clarity, and old historical “truths” are interpreted anew in light of modern historiography.

More than two million people visit Gettysburg National Military Park every year.  Accurately describing and interpreting events during this signature battle influences the nation's public memory of this seminal event.   The authors state that their goal is to give both visitor and reader “a better appreciation for the complexities of mid-nineteenth century combat” and a better appreciation of the challenges facing historians “who seek to uncover an ideal called historical 'truth' in the midst of Gettysburg's myriad voices and assessments.”  Reardon and Vossler succeed admirably on both counts.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

With a Sword in one hand

& Jomini in the other:

The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

Carol Reardon

University of North Carolina Press, 2012
192 pp., $30.00

Review by Gordon Berg

In spite of the descriptive title given to Carol Reardon’s Steven and Janice Brose Lectures on the Era of the Civil War delivered at Penn State University, she concludes that “Jomini and the entire body of antebellum military thought he represented provided far less useful guidance than the Civil War generation required for the dimensions of the challenge they faced.”

 In three succinct chapters, Ms. Reardon examines the public debate that exploded in the North over what military strategy would best defeat the Confederacy; the characteristics that made the best commanders; and the human element of war, a topic largely ignored by the military theorists of the day.  Her conclusions are based on voluminous research into archival material, newspapers and periodicals, contemporary and historical works on military theory, and a prescient sampling of today’s rich Civil War historiography.

In the North a “cacophony of voices,” professional and amateur, inundated the Lincoln administration and the general public with detailed conceptual frameworks and hair-brained schemes, all designed to bring the war to a swift and successful conclusion.  Unfortunately, no strategic Rosetta Stone materialized.

Second only to strategy in the public discourse was who best to command the Union forces, a professionally trained military intellectual or a natural born military genius who arises from the common people to lead the nation in a time of great peril like George Washington or Andrew Jackson did.  Ms. Reardon notes that Northerners debated this issue “with enthusiasm and not a little vitriol.”

Finally, Ms. Reardon uses the Overland Campaign to assess how Union commanders painfully learned that victory doesn’t always lie with the best plan or the biggest battalions.  Effectiveness against the enemy also depended on the physical, mental, and emotional state of the men in the ranks, a reality learned “at a high cost from practical experience.”  These are issues still debated among military strategists today.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.