Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
*Starred Review* Few battles provoke debate like Gettysburg, whose bibliography exceeds 6,000 items. One more won’t settle the what-ifs, but Guelzo’s entry identifies key controversies, trenchantly advocates its interpretations, and rests on a sensible foundation, the confusion of a Civil War battle. A noisome cacophony opaque with smoke, the Gettysburg battlefield allowed officers and soldiers only fragmentary glimpses of the action, limiting their situational awareness to their immediate surroundings. Wary, moreover, of postwar memoirists’ tendencies to justify themselves or fault others, Guelzo constructs his Gettysburg as much as possible from contemporaneous sources like orders, reports, and letters. His result reads like the battle might have been experienced, as an episodic series of terrifying minibattles directed by colonels and fought by regiments, whose clashes guided the outcome more than anything done by the respective army commanders on the scene. Rather dismissive of Union general Meade, Guelzo derogates Confederate general Lee less for his decisions at Gettysburg than for failing to strategically arrange a defensive battle and falling into the offensive one that developed. A political historian of the Civil War (Lincoln and Douglas, 2008), Guelzo demonstrates versatile historical skill in this superior treatment of Gettysburg. --Gilbert Taylor