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Drooling on the Pillow

Friday, October 31, 2003

Unconditional Surrender 

I happened to read Stephen Sears book on Gettysburg a couple of months ago. It's an excellent account. Nothing radically new -- after 10,000 books you'd have to go pretty far for something really new -- but exceptionally clear and vivid. The maps are great. If anything sets it apart from other accounts I've read its that Sears makes fewer excuses for Lee. He makes clear the problems Lee was facing in this campaign -- Stuart's disappearance, the hard feelings of both Longstreet and Hill, the lack of coordination and communication, but he makes it plain that the decisions were Lee's and they were almost uniformly and uncharacteristically bad.

Anyway, it set me off on a Civil War kick like I haven't had in decades. A book on Antietam, one on Fredericksburg and one on Chancellersville. I think I'm coming to an end of this run with Grants memoirs. This book I'm really enjoying. I've read that one of the secrets of Grant's success was the lucidness of his prose. That is, unlike Burnside's botched orders at Fredericksburg that turned a very winnable battle into a catastrophe, no one ever didn't know where he was supposed to be or when he was supposed to be there after receiving orders from Grant. Well, its evident in this volume. It's very readable, quite humorous and generous. He glides over some episodes one would like to know more about, but, hey, he was dying.
Posted by: Sluggo / 1:21 PM
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