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Gettysburg
By Stephen W. Sears
Houghton Mifflin
623 pages; $30

To read Stephen Sears' outstanding account of the Battle of Gettysburg is to understand why the Calvinists in the Conference on Faith and History are so reluctant to say anything about God's action in the past. It's a strange phenomenon easily observed: the Calvinist, quoting the Genevan himself, says that, ultimately, "nothing happens except what is knowingly decreed by God."

The inquirer asks how this view applies to Robert E. Lee's Pennsylvania campaign of 1863 (total combined casualties: 57,225), and is met with uncomfortable puzzlement or a reproachful assertion of divine sovereignty. That's partly because, as Sears repeatedly shows, 140 years of study have not done much to clean up the awful messiness and contingency that marked this devastating struggle. Nor has it done anything to stem the view that things really could have turned out differently.

"I think that our lines should have advanced immediately" after the failure of Pickett's Charge, Union General Winfield Hancock said, "and I believe that we should have won a great victory." In a letter he never sent, Abraham Lincoln gently chided the Union general, George Meade, for letting Lee escape back to Virginia following the Confederates' defeat at Gettysburg. "[Lee]was within your easy grasp," Lincoln wrote, "and to have closed upon him would … have ended the war." Sears disagrees with Lincoln; he thinks Meade's decision not to attack Lee immediately after Gettysburg was smart militarily, for then Lee would have had the advantage of defense—and Lee's men were hungry for revenge.

As for Lee, Sears' assessment is mostly critical. Where General Meade remained well informed, Lee stood almost aloof, employing a "hands-off managing style." Where Meade consulted with his generals and valued consensus, Lee seemed not very interested in his generals' opinions. James Longstreet, Lee's "war horse," could see what was coming on the third day of battle; "I don't want to make this attack," he said.

Looking out over the three-quarters of a mile they would have to traverse, under fire, before making contact with Union forces, even lowly privates could see that their venture would fail. But Lee didn't think it would fail; and after the war, he continued to believe that, had Pickett's attack been followed up effectively, the attack could have succeeded. And perhaps it could have (though Sears doubts it). Needless to say, myriad southerners have wished it had.

Lee seems to have been driven by overconfidence and a thorough contempt for the abilities of his enemy. (Previous experience made Lee's low view of the Union's martial ability understandable.) Hubris is sinful; pride went before the fall of Lee's plans. But there isn't much of a "lesson" to be learned here. Readers of his biographies know that Lee was no less pious than his Yankee counterparts. Sears quotes him, and his foes, as depending on the same "providence" in the same way. And, in any event, Lee would trounce Union troops several times after Gettysburg.

The South's ultimate defeat had partly to do with a relatively small industrial base and a lack of manpower, as well as with festering divisions among secessionists. It may also have had to do with divine judgment against slaveholders, but Abraham Lincoln (that curiously impious but profound theologian) may have been more on the mark when he surmised that the war revealed God's judgment against both sides.

What makes Gettysburg endlessly interesting is that Meade could have counterattacked Lee, and Lee's men could have had a quick chance to deliver paybacks. Before the battle, Confederate cavalry master J.E.B. Stuart could have supplied Lee with the much-needed military intelligence he lacked. And if the South had gained a major victory on northern soil, then perhaps the French would have assisted the Confederacy's bid for independence the way they assisted the American revolutionaries of an earlier generation. And if these things had happened, then the course of American history could have taken a different turn.

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47