of armies, of the attack and repulse, of victory and defeat. Guelzo quotes a New York soldier’s remembrance, and thereby demonstrates the challenge any military historian faces: “The reality of war is largely obscured by descriptions that tell of movements. Guelzo, a distinguished Lincoln scholar who teaches at Gettysburg College, offers an extraordinarily detailed and realistic account. In his graphic and emotionally affecting “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” Allen C. Of those wounded, approximately 14 percent died in gruesome impromptu hospitals over the next few months. The Union and Confederate armies officially reported a combined 5,747 dead, 27,229 wounded and 9,515 captured or missing over 72 hours of fighting. Spread over 15 square miles around a small Pennsylvania town on the first three days of July 1863, involving more than 160,000 soldiers and huge numbers of camp laborers, including between 10,000 and 30,000 slaves forced to serve the invading Southern army, the conflagration caused a degree of slaughter like no other in American history. Such issues never stem the tide of writers drawn by the intellectual challenge (or by the charms of the subject’s market).

And although this may be the most documented battle ever, the historian must use a vast supply of unreliable postwar recollections as sources. The battlefield contest itself involved the highest possible political and national stakes. The ghastly scale of bloodletting has to be explained. Any historian contemplating this event faces numerous daunting problems - apart from the fact that thousands of books and articles have already been published on the Gettysburg campaign. The battle of Gettysburg was a human and environmental catastrophe and, for the United States, almost the beginning of the end of its existence.

Guelzo gettysburg